A new digital home for the
real estate expert Newsec

Newsec are experts in real estate. They operate in consultancy, investment, management, energy efficiency and digitization in seven markets in the Nordics and the Baltics.

We helped structure, design and build their new international and local websites. The result enables both delivery and cohesion of the total brand experience as well as flexible content creation for their many editors.

New branding strategy = New website

When Newsec updated its brand strategy and identity, this needed to be reflected on their websites. Before we could start the website production was it is important to have a good overview of the context.

There are several challenges with websites for large, international organizations (Newsec has 2700 employees in 7 countries). For example, the long-term must brand strategy is balanced against tactical goals and everyday tasks that the web needs to handle.

We therefore began our work with an extensive inventory. Through interviews with stakeholders, we could capturing their expertise, experiences and needs. We mapped Newsec's digital interfaces to determine which role the site was best suited for. We investigated also which services were already used for e.g. marketing communications to build on existing ones solutions in a flexible and cost-effective way.

The preparatory work took place in close collaboration with Newsec and resulted in a new website strategy as a first step.

How the Strategy Took Shape

We started by prioritizing stakeholders and their needs, markets, and the website's focus. Once this was clear, we decided how it should be expressed. Some of the more prominent decisions were as follows:

Insights

Newsec is known for its comprehensive reports on the property market. To further strengthen Newsec's image as experts and increase awareness, we created the Insights section. There, visitors can now find articles, videos, podcast episodes, and reports, all gathered in one place.

Subsites

Large websites are often difficult to navigate because they cater to so many audiences simultaneously. Perhaps the biggest challenge was prioritizing the needs of the many visitor types. We wanted to avoid overwhelming visitors with complicated menus and numerous shortcuts. The solution was to create subsites within the overall site. A subsite has its own main menu where irrelevant pages are removed, which facilitates navigation and makes it easier to complete tasks. However, the subsite is not separated from the rest of the website but builds on the same functionality and design, which keeps the web presence cohesive.

An example of such a subsite is "Tenants in Sweden", where private and commercial tenants can get help with customer service matters and more.

Language and Markets

Language management is another challenge for large websites. There are a couple of overarching ways to handle language and translation on the web. Either you use the same website structure for all markets, where only the language differs. The pages are set up centrally in the CMS with different fields for the various languages. The advantages of this approach are that it provides great control over the message and faster website construction. The disadvantage is that local exceptions cannot be accommodated.

The other alternative works essentially in the opposite way. Each market is given full freedom to create the content required, with pros and cons mirrored in the opposite way.

Regardless of which path you choose, it becomes a strategic decision with a significant impact on the technical architecture. Changing course halfway through the project becomes costly.

After analyzing the strategy and the editors' needs, we concluded that both alternatives were needed. Some page sections benefited from being templated while others required greater freedom. For example, the content under Insights needed to be produced both centrally and locally to be useful for international visitors and relevant to a single market. This had a major impact on the choice of CMS.

Technology Choice

After defining how we wanted to design the website to best meet the goals and needs, we needed to make a technology choice. We started by evaluating the current CMS. It turned out not to be built to meet our requirements and was not particularly cost-effective. We needed a technology that could grow with us and easily integrate with other services and IT systems that Newsec uses. Since we wanted to launch the website as soon as possible, we needed something that allowed us to retain and gradually phase out sections that were not primary to the strategy.

The choice ultimately fell on Sanity as the base.

Sanity is a headless CMS that lets you publish content on various digital platforms. It provides great freedom in how data and content are handled, making it easy to organize content as needed. This facilitates, for example, the creation of complex, multilingual websites or when the same content needs to be displayed in multiple places.

In addition to Sanity, we built the website with the Next.js framework and integrated other services such as Microsoft Power BI and Mailchimp.

The CMS's Sanity Studio was configured to be flexible enough for Newsec's various local marketing departments, while still being easy to manage for employees who primarily work with tasks other than communication.

The Sanity solution also made monitoring of security, performance, and other updates easier, as much of this is handled by Sanity themselves.

Management

To succeed in the long term with websites involving many people, it was important that all competencies had the right prerequisites. We were responsible for training in the website strategy, CMS, and subsequent management.

The Ongoing Work

No matter how many reviews of design and functionality you have before launch, shortcomings and new functional needs are often identified only when you start using the website for real.

To quickly capture this, we kept the communication channels between us and the editors in the different countries simple and open. Instead of getting stuck early in complicated issue management systems, we handled discussions about needs and changes via email and video meetings directly between Newsec's editors and Raket's designers and developers. This allowed us to maintain a high pace of development and learn directly from the editors about what works and what doesn't, something that is difficult to capture by reading a user story.