Itineris is pleased to announce that it has won Sitefinity Website of Year for its creation of the Plumlife website. The Progress Sitefinity Award showcases the best in website creativity, design, user experience, functionality and presentation.

With over fifteen years’ experience in website design, build, digital strategy and digital marketing, Itineris has won over 20 awards for its work, including Digital Champion of Champions, and the Sitefinity Healthcare Website of the Year in 2014, 2015 and 2016. With offices in Spitalfields, London and Ipswich, Suffolk, the agency is a Google Partner, Microsoft Certified Partner, a member of the Amazon Web Services partner network and a Sitefinity Platinum Partner.

Itineris entered the Real Estate and Construction category of the Sitefinity awards with its work on the Plumlife Homes website. 

Plumlife Homes is a ‘profit for purpose’ housing company owned and operated by Great Places Housing Group in the North West and Yorkshire. Based in Didsbury, Manchester, Plumlife offers first-time buyers affordable homeownership solutions, via options including Shared Ownership, Help to Buy or outright sale.

Plumlife wanted to create a customer-centric and attractive website that would guide new customers through the housing options available and explain the process of home buying or renting. It also needed to allow current customers to view a range of information about their tenancies online, such as viewing rent statements, the ability to pay rent online and to report a change of circumstance and repairs.

The Plumlife website was launched in December 2017 and has already seen significant improvements to user engagement. The average session duration has increased by 24% and pages viewed per session has increased by 8%. User retention has seen significant improvements, with the volume of returning users increasing by 15%. This success was one of the reasons why the project was named Sitefinity Website of Year.

The new landing page designs have seen a significant boost to the ability to keep users on site, with bounce rate reducing by 23%. The addition of Sitefinity has seen a good boost to user experience with average page load times reducing by 16%.

Matt Horsup, head of digital marketing at itineris said: “One of our main tasks was to improve the customer journey on the site. We did this through improved site navigation and a new search facility for available properties, which also offered ‘promoted properties’ and property of the week deals at the footer of the search results page. 

“The site also includes Browsealoud to help users with accessibility issues and the ability to book appointments or request a call back online. Two of the main features to help futureproof the site were the inclusion of a self-service upload facility that other housing providers could use to upload their developments to and a data feed to other property portals such as Rightmove. We are so pleased to see an uplift in activity on the site and to have been recognised in such a prestigious award.”

The agency’s work on The Leprosy Mission’s website was also nominated as a finalist for the Non Profit category. 

Sitefinity said about the project: “The new site gave the charity the global presence it deserved and a look that befits the fantastic work undertaken.”