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Spinning Webs

Experts advise landlords on what to include — and what to leave out — when designing Web sites

By Jennifer Hopfinger

Sleek navigation, top-notch photography, a stylish look — these are among the elements that make for award-winning Web design. These, at least, were the ones cited when South Coast Plaza’s Web site was honored at the 10th annual Webby Awards, last June.

South Coast Plaza, an upscale shopping mall in Costa Mesa, Calif., was named an official Webby Award honoree this year by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, whose awards recognize excellence on the Internet.

The South Coast site, www.southcoastplaza.com, combines high-fashion photography with high-tech functionality and provides visitors with what they need to get to the mall and to maximize their time once there. “Our customers can experience the sophistication of South Coast Plaza by not only visiting the shopping center, but also by visiting our Web site,” said Debra Gunn Downing, the mall’s executive director of marketing.

Nowadays landlords see an attractive and informative Web site as essential to their marketing efforts. But designing such a site is no job for the delicate. A shopping center owner often faces the dual challenge of erecting sites that represent their own firm and the many individual properties in their portfolio. These sites can have very different purposes, of course.

Luckily, the trick to creating a first-rate business Web site is the same in any industry: focus on the audience above all else. It is the audience that drives the design, says Bob Dooley, president of Des Moines, Iowa-based Web developer Red 5 Interactive (www.r5i.com). “Audience dictates everything: the design aesthetic, the navigation, the content choices, everything,” Dooley said. “Your goal is to drive your audience to the information they need as quickly as possible, and you accomplish that through the design.”

Red 5 Interactive has experience with the needs of retail real estate developers. The firm helped build the Web site of Philadelphia-based PREIT, which leases, develops and manages properties in 13 states. The site, www.preit.com, went live in early 2005 after about six months in development. That investment of time apparently has paid off — the site earned a gold award in NAREIT’s Annual Report Contest.

Identifying and directing your primary audiences starts on the home page. Dooley advises basing the site’s navigation on the audience groups that will be visiting, and keeping the main navigation choices to a bare minimum. On PREIT’s site those choices are “investor relations,” “leasing information,” “portfolio information” and “about PREIT.”

Just as audiences can overlap, so can a site’s navigation function. Many areas of the PREIT site are cross-linked, creating a sense of fluidity without making the user feel lost. “Once you’ve established who your audience is, the content should be relevant to their needs, and the design should be respectful of their time,” said Peggy Zier, creative director of Omaha, Nebraska-based Waitt Interactive (www.waittinteractive.com). Make your Web site user-friendly with obvious navigation elements and universal fonts, she says. Keep content short and easy to read; program the site to work across different browsers and at different Internet connection speeds.

Waitt Interactive designed the site of RED Development (www.reddevelopment.com). RED, whose main offices are in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Kansas City, Mo., develops, leases, manages and owns shopping centers throughout the Midwest and Southwest.

RED decided to build a new Web site in late 2004 while redoing its branding campaign. Management wanted to redevelop the site to match its new message, so the images from the branding campaign have been integrated throughout the site. The navigation reflects the rebranding as well, with “vision,” “commitment,” “success” and “partnership” tabs marking the top drop-down menus, instead of the traditional navigation buttons one might otherwise see.

Zier recommends using color schemes that match those of the branding materials. “The Web site design should enhance your brand,” Zier said. “It should have the same look and feel throughout.”

Dooley agrees. “A Web site should be consistent with offline marketing,” he said. “If people are familiar with your brand offline, they want to feel like they’re in the same place when they visit you online.”

But projecting the right colors on the Web is difficult, because there can be enormous differences in appearance from monitor to monitor. “You can’t control color online the way you can in print,” Zier said. “Beige on one monitor may look pink on another. You have to expect some variance.”

To be sure, the wrong color combinations can doom a design, these specialists say. “Pick colors that contrast nicely with one another,” said Dooley. “Yellow text on a blue background will make people’s eyes cross.”

PREIT’s home page uses subdued gray and white contrasted with vibrant green, blue, yellow and orange. Each of the site’s four main areas uses a distinct bright color, so users always know where they are. “Retail is a very dynamic industry, but the actual trust is conservative,” said Cheryl Dougherty, PREIT’s vice president of marketing. “We had to marry the two with our color choices.”

Consistency, specifically with regard to fonts and images, is important too, says Dooley. “You can get wild with the design as long as you’re consistent about using it,” he said. “You can’t have different kinds of navigation on different pages, for instance.”

Dooley warns against using flashy technology, such as an elaborate intro, that serves no purpose. “People think those things are neat, but the problem is when the audience sees it for the hundredth time, they’re pretty fed up with it,” Dooley said.

Still, the site should be visually exciting, of course, and photographs are crucial. This imagery can set the mood for the whole site. A fresh photo of one of PREIT’s properties appears every time the home page is refreshed. One home-page feature PREIT is particularly proud of is a prominent logo commemorating how many consecutive dividends it has paid since 1962 — 118 to date.

Though RED’s site contains pictures of its properties, the company decided to focus more on the symbolic imagery of its branding campaign: a needle in a haystack, signposts along a road, an ice climber. The color scheme is dominated by dramatic red and black.

Both Waitt Interactive and Red 5 Interactive say they try to make things operate as smoothly on the back end as the site appears on the front end. The firms strive to make content-management systems easy to use, giving the client’s staff the freedom to update the site on their own without the help of programmers or the need for extensive maintenance fees.

The mall sites have their own URLs and appear, from the user’s perspective, to be stand-alone sites. But they are all running off the same back-end engines and content-management systems. This allows the companies to save on costs and get their sites up quickly.

“All of our properties are tailored to the community in a unique way,” said John Bacon, vice president of marketing at RED. “They’re not cookie-cutter projects, and we don’t want them to seem that way online either.”

What’s the price tag for all this work? Dooley says the cost of building a site from scratch can be anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000, depending on the complexity. RED’s corporate site cost about $15,000 to build. Its first mall Web site cost $12,000, but now that it’s up, each new project costs only $2,400 to add.

PREIT’s site remains a work in progress, with the company having made countless changes to it since it went live, says Dougherty. “You learn on the Web by doing,” she said. “There’s no harm in trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Looking back on it now, building the site seemed daunting, but it gets easier as you go along.”