MG Commercial Real Estate

Providence, Rhode Island

Project Details

• Company: MG Commercial
• Industry: Real estate
• Responsibilities: Design, XHTML and CSS page builds and templates
• Launched: December 18, 2008
• View This Project: www.mgcommercial.com

Project Summary

MG Commercial Real Estate represents the first client project I was able to complete from start to finish (initial design concepts to site launch) as part of Envision Technology Advisors.

This company was a longtime client of Envision and the company had designed their previous Web site, which was actually working really well for them and which they received compliments on regularly. Still, the site had been up for a number of years and they were ready for a new look.

In initial conversations with MG Commercial, it became clear that they were looking for something classy and sleek – a very upscale look for the new Web site. Envision put together a number of design comps, mine included. I intentionally took some risks with my design, breaking away from the company’s existing brand to go with something completely new and different. At that point, MG Commercial’s colors were predominately bright red with some white as well. I kept the red, but strictly limited its use to only links and clickable areas. I went heavy on the deep grays and black to give a sophisticated, high-end feel to the design. I also intentionally kept the color palette extremely limited so that the only ‘full color’ pieces of the site would be the property images, further emphasizing their importance. The one item that was a hold-over from the older site was the ‘featured property’ Flash movie on the home page. That element was part of their older design and we carried that over to provide a sense of consistency between the old and the new (that being the case, I did not design that Flash element).

From a site build standpoint, this project offered me a number of challenges. The property listings section is actually powered by a third party company called LoopLink, so I spent a fair amount of time working with them to integrate my design and XHTML and CSS templates with their service.

I also spent a good deal of time adding browser specific styles to the site to fix certain display inconstancies, most of them for IE6. This was an interesting exercise as I had not done too many browser specific styles up until this point, but had rather accepted those (often) minor display differences as par for the course. For this particular project, the client was very concerned about ironing out as many of those display differences as possible and in the end we were able to address each of them and create a very consistent display for the new site across multiple browsers and platforms.

You can visit the new MG Commercial site, which was launched in December of 2008, at www.mgcommercial.com. You can also learn more about the specific inspiration for this design in my blog post, 'The Devil's in the Details'.