Romancing the Home Interiors (video testimonial)

Overview

 

Romancing the Home Interiors owner and lead designer, Marcy Sacks, had a website that was old, look outdated, was not mobile-friendly and did not represent the design skills and esthetic of her firm.  Her site was hard to navigate and didn’t allow her to show images of her work in a way that made it easy for her website visitors to understand her value.

 

We built Marcy a new, custom, mobile-friendly website that presents her work beautifully.  Marcy and her staff can easily update the site with the photos and descriptions of their latest project and the overall design of the site fits well with the business’ personality.

 

The new website has been well received by customers and prospects alike and Marcy is proud to use it in her marketing activities.  She often tells me it has definitely improved her business.

The website is here.

 

 

Background/The Problem/Project Goals and Objectives

 

Romancing the Home Interiors (RTHI), owned by lead designer Marcy Sacks, provides design and decorating consulting services to individuals and small businesses.  Her services include giving her clients guidance on room layout, appliance location, furniture, paint and fabric color, decor, window and floor treatments and overall design. Marcy works closely with her clients to understand how the rooms need to flow and what budget is available.

 

The RTHI tagline is “If you’re not in love with your home, we should chat.”

 

When we met Marcy, she had an outdated site that did not reflect her design esthetic or services.  The site was old and difficult to navigate. She was unable to update the content and the site was basically an inadequate brochure for her growing business.

 

Marcy wanted a site that showcased her work and gave her website visitors a sense of the types of design assistance she could give.  Marcy is an authorized dealer for Grabar and Hunter Douglas window treatments and she especially wanted to showcase her design skill in those areas.

 

She wanted to be able to update the site whenever she wanted and needed a blog where she could describe recent design gigs to bolster her social proof.

 

Her site needed to be mobile-friendly — many of her prospects use smartphones only so her beautiful work needed to work well on the smallest screens

 

Marcy’s entry level product – Design Therapy – is a short gig where she works with a client on a specific decor issue with a narrow scope and timeframe.  It’s a relative easy entree into home decorating and her site needed to make it easy for her prospects to understand the service.

 

Process and Insight

 

Romancing the Home Interiors needed to be a physically attractive site with a mix of photos and descriptive text.  So we could understand what Marcy wanted, we interviewed her and asked her to give us examples of other sites she liked.

 

Marcy gave us her logo and we created a color palette to complement it.

 

As a designer, it’s important to to have photographs to support the descriptions of her work. We coached Marcy on how to identify the best pictures for the site and showed her how to put them in a shared folder so we could use them to build her site.

 

Once we had a sense for what Marcy wanted as well as the descriptive text and photographs, we created an attractive design using the color palette based on her logo.

 

Solution

 

We built the new RTHI website with several features that Marcy loves:

 

• the site is very easy to navigate on all devices
• we used a lot of white space so the photographs of her work stand out beautifully
• the site shows a selection of large images at the top of the home page with “Ken Burns” movement to showcase some of Marcy’s work
• we chose a cursive font to reinforce the design aspect of the site
• the blog is featured on the home page. We used creative techniques to show the categories in a user-selectable way; clicking the category dynamically shows only the associated posts and selecting a post links to the detail.

 

It is very easy for Marcy and her staff to add an and update photos and content on the site anytime. We created short videos to show her how to make those changes.

 

 

 

Results

 

The new website was an immediate hit — with Marcy and her clients. She gets compliments on the site all the time and she’s thrilled that it represents her service offerings and design esthetic so well.  It’s easy for her to put her current work on the site and she tells me that her business has never been better!

 

She continues to work with individual home owners and has also increased her work with commercial clients. For example, she got a large engagement to do the decor in a 50-unit new condominium complex.  Marcy is convinced that her internet presence helped her secure that business.

 

We recently started to plan for and implement an online gift card function where website visitors can buy Design Therapy gift cards on her website.  She expects this first product offering on her website to generate new revenue for the holiday season.