Stately Homes, part of The Binney Group, commissioned LEAP to create a brand identity for the luxury housing developer. Upon successful completion of this initial project, they further engaged LEAP to design and build a multi-language website which would showcase their services to an international audience. The luxury marketplace, particularly in the housing and property development sector, relies on the feel one gets from first impressions. The feel, in this case, was as much about an emotional response to luxury as well as the need to confidently address the practical steps of progressing with the client’s vision for their dream home.
Our brief was to create a site which would be simple, modern and image-driven. It also needed to work across English, Russian, Arabic and Chinese language variations. LEAP’s project managers facilitated a smooth process across all elements of the website’s creation including design, development, copywriting and transcreation.
Overcoming challenges
By selecting a Mondrian-style format for the site, our designers could harness the attractive possibilities of the geometric grid and piece together scalable rectangular shapes to compose the client’s visual narrative. Even with this framework, the digital design team faced multiple challenges to deliver an elegant solution for Stately Homes. They needed to consider the cultural differences which would shape the user’s experience of imagery featured on the site. LEAP’s language and culture team gave our digital team access to the expertise of cultural consultants to support the creative direction.
The design and flow of a multi-language site can change dramatically between languages, particularly when layouts need to work well for those who read from right to left, as in Arabic, and from left to right, as with English. The team’s responsive designs ensured that the flow of text including word lengths and scalability would work in harmony with the site’s aesthetic and functionality. Because automatic geolocation and assumed language defaults do not always coincide, our developers incorporated a language selection tool on the landing page to enable user-choice to activate the automatic text replacements across the site.
Our digital project managers worked closely with our language team who centrally-managed the transcreation process. Our select pool of top in-market copywriters worked with the approved English text to create versions in Russian, Arabic and Chinese. To ensure that our international copywriters had used the most up-to-date expressions and correct industry terminology, we then submitted their transcreations to industry-specific local market experts for further validation. This provided the added reassurance essential to maintain the credibility of a premium brand in the property sector. Further rounds of comprehensive analysis and verification by our language account team ensured that Stately Homes would maintain one brand with one voice across the multi-language website.
Attractive results
The resulting Stately Homes website is contemporary and sleek. It stylishly showcases content and communicates effectively to international users in their native languages. Furthermore, our digital design team are pleased to share the news that we will be continuing our service to The Binney Group by designing and building websites for their other subsidiary companies. We look forward to sharing these with you in due course. In the meantime, you can explore the stories behind our other digital design projects or speak with our team to discuss your requirements.
