With the help of The Ivy Group, Great Eastern Management launched its redesigned website for three shopping centers in November 2014. Mobile devices are quickly replacing computers as the most popular method of internet browsing. With the continued increase in mobile web traffic, a mobile-responsive website is essential to successful marketing.

Shopping Centers On-the-go

For Great Eastern Management--long standing Ivy Group client and the property management company behind Seminole Square, Pantops, and Blue Ridge shopping centers--Google Analytics revealed that over 50% of site traffic on cvilleshop.com was from mobile users. With such a heavy volume of mobile traffic, The Ivy Group knew that it was time to revamp Great Eastern's site to make it fully responsive.

We approached the website's redesign with the goal of making the website experience intuitive, usable, and enjoyable for on-the-go customers.

Sister Shopping Centers, One Happy Management Company

Cvilleshop.com posed an interesting design challenge: how best to build one site for three separate brands with a comon management company?

The end result is a bright, inviting design that ties the three separate shopping centers together through a parallel layout. The layout aligns the centers while also distinguishing them as the unique spaces that they are with distinct coloring and content.

"It’s a credit to the design team that they have developed a highly functional site that incorporates multiple stores, products, and logos and presents all that information in an attractive and easy-to-navigate manner." - Pam Fitzgerald, Managing Partner

Keeping Content Fresh

The shopping center landing page now provides more information at a glance, as well as a link to go directly to the official or corporate website.

Store pages now have a variety of photo display options, including photo galleries, and links to their own social media accounts. This functionality is a great opportunity for the stores that do not have their own websites. Integration with the refurbished news page also alerts customers to the latest happenings for each store.

Seminole and Pantops social media are conveniently displayed in custom feeds, allowing mobile shoppers to browse special promotions and helpful shopping content. For example: cvilleshop.com/seminole-square-shopping-center/social.

While social media provides a great platform for sharing deals and information, cvilleshop.com also needed a better way of displaying and maintaining the news from stores, deals, events, etc.

The old site had a news section for each shopping center; however, text length was limited and there was no archive for retired stories, which meant that the bulletins could not benefit SEO. The new and improved news archive store bulletins, which in turn boosts SEO.

The new site was built with WordPress as the content management system, to allow content managers to easily update store listings and news. With WordPress, non-technical staff can easily manage sites and keep content fresh.

About Great Eastern Management Company

With more than 40 years in business, Great Eastern Management Company is a real estate development, construction, finance and management company with commercial, office, retail and multi-family residential properties in Lynchburg, Charlottesville and Harrisonburg. For more information, visit www.gemc.com.

Old homepage, developed in 2010:

Old news section, example:

Old store center page: