It’s very important to refresh a brand, an identity and a website every three to four years. New features, trends, your business goals and the dreaded “dated” look of your current site or brand typically determines the necessity of change.

A patchwork system your business or organization has in place because of resources and growth also determines remodeling. This is the case for Key Community Management (Key CMI). Key Community Management oversees HOA communities through legal, administrative, accounting and violation resolution services.

By design, Key Community Management‘s community managers each maintain a small number of communities in their portfolios so they can adequately provide their communities with the attention and time needed for effective management.

Because of growth, changes and the desire to expand, Key CMI’s multiple community’s websites lack a cohesive administrative structure. Changes in personnel also created an incoherent system causing disruption, confusion and simple retention of basic functions.

From the Ground Up Redesign

When we came onboard, we had to reverse engineer the products in place to understand what dysfunctional issues needed to be resolved. Without judgement, we set about to create a template from which the various communities Key CMI chaperoned could be formed anew.

With the new template, we used a website philosophy called gamification; the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts, such as websites. Gamification improves user engagement, organizational productivity, flow and ease of use. Plus it’s fun. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. And since residential communities involve a variety of ages we thought that this feature would benefit the youthful to the more experienced alike.

We also realize that web designers have “trained” lay people to adhere to the “standardization” of websites. We feel that it is unfair, limited and not very creative. We think that the websites Key CMI is currently using; static multi-menu, seemingly multi-page websites could be revitalized since upon closer examination they are really one-page websites.