Like retailers striving to stay fresh to attract customers, shopping center owners are redesigning their websites to buttress their brands, improve communication with the target audience and deliver information that is more precise. Among the companies that revamped their websites last year were Butler Enterprises, InvenTrust Properties, Kimco Realty Corp. and RPAI. Those working on new designs as of early this year include Starwood Retail Partners and The Woodmont Co.
Websites these days typically are designed to be viewed on smart phones and tablets, offer full-page scrolling and simpler navigation rather than tabs along a horizontal bar, can be easily updated and, perhaps most important, feature high-resolution images and videos.
“A person’s first point of contact with a company is often its website, and we want to put our best face where people start,” said Rebecca Galuppo, vice president of marketing at Fort Worth, Texas–based Woodmont, which is launching a website redesign this spring that will crown an ambitious rebranding effort. “We’re coming from a more traditional site that everyone knows how to use, but it’s dated.”
Kimco Realty launched its new design last May. The firm’s home page now features short film clips that provide bird’s-eye and street-level views of its properties. Five shopping centers were in the rotation as of early this year, and the firm was working on adding more, says Diane Agostinello, director of marketing and leasing services. “With the technology available today, video is the best way to get people’s attention,” she said. “Visitors don’t have time to read a lot of text, and something visual is much more effective.”
Similarly, Butler Enterprises, which launched its new website last year, added a video montage that highlights the company’s history and the economic appeal of its Gainesville, Fla., hometown. The firm owns three adjacent projects in that market, which are to total some 2 million square feet of retail space once a town center is fully developed within the next few years. “With broadband technology improving every year, website developers must create more multimedia-rich, interactive websites that push content to the visitor,” said Deborah Butler, the company’s president. “Visitors also expect it to load fast. If something is running slow, they will just go somewhere else.”
RPAI and InvenTrust, both of which are based in Oak Brook, Ill., expanded their use of high-resolution images, although they took different approaches. InvenTrust features images of its employees along with anecdotes describing their experiences working for the company. The subjects change quarterly and will include the reflections of tenant experiences, too, says Lisa Alexander, the firm’s director of marketing. “That’s distinctive about our website,” she said. “Instead of posting property images on our home page, like most shopping center owners and operators, we have stories about our company.” RPAI, on the other hand, updated images of properties and tenant spaces in its target markets in an effort to convey the character and feel of its shopping centers and tenants, says Tim O’Connell, the firm’s director of digital marketing and communications.
“I think website design trends right now place a heavy emphasis on photography with a minimalist look,” he said. “We worked with a lot of our retailers to capture great interiors and exteriors, and those images are present throughout the website.”
In most cases, shopping center owners consider their websites business-to-business platforms, with brokers and potential or existing tenants as their primary audience (and investors too, in the case of public companies) and media or other information seekers as secondary visitors. Though Butler Enterprises designed its site to serve businesses and consumers alike, other landlords typically use separate shopping center websites to serve shoppers.
The latest round of website designs generally feature beefed-up property pages to better respond to tenants and retail brokers seeking space. Most have boosted the volume of information available, including interactive demographic maps, availability of space and similar resources, to make leasing easier and more efficient. “The property page is the lifeblood of a shopping center website,” said Kimco’s Agostinello. “We have various audiences and try to balance everything we do, but the number-one functionality needs to be focused on the broker or potential tenant side.”
It is important that websites contain interactive communication tools and also that they be easy to update, says Chelsie Petereit, vice president of marketing at Chicago-based Starwood Retail Partners, which expects to launch a new website this spring. “I think that flexibility and the ability to make updates and additions in-house are the result of tech advances over just the past five years,” Petereit said. Starwood plans to provide tenant criteria packages on its upgraded property page, so that its new retail, restaurant and entertainment tenants will have the information they need “without having to go through an endless run of emails.”
It is also critical for websites to provide landlords with analytics on which pages and data are most in demand among visitors, shopping center officials say. RPAI employs a heat-mapping plug-in that uses colors to reveal how much activity a web page is generating – red typically indicates the most traffic and blue the least. To date, the plug-in confirms that space-seeking potential tenants and investors are the most active users of the site, O’Connell says.
Woodmont also uses tools to track users, and digging into search components and other usage patterns can help website designers tailor the site’s information and interactivity to the user’s needs, Galuppo says. “We need to ensure that those visiting the website feel like they have been heard and acknowledged,” she said. “There’s a story to be had just by paying attention to what people are doing when they are on the site.” n