Starwood Retail Partners

Goals and Direction

Starwood Retail felt that their site was lagging behind their competitors, and they wanted to do a full redesign in a way that would allow them to provide thorough information with an updated look. They wanted their website to inspire, engage, and “wow” visitors while advancing the company brand and culture – innovative, creative, fresh, and young but with tremendous experience. The site also needed to intuitively expedite the leasing process, showcase their centers as prime opportunities, reinforce their retail expertise, instill pride in current employees, and inspire potential employees and partners.

Simply put, none of the content on the old Starwood Retail site described what services they provided. It had information scattered across different pages in a way that made the information feel overwhelming, and the content was not organized at a property level. This made it extremely difficult to find location-specific information because all of their content was shown in massive lists.

The new site needed to achieve three primary goals:

• Surface content to make it easier for marketers, future tenants and investors to find what they needed.
• Tell a story about the services Starwood Retail provides.
• Modernize the site by migrating to Drupal 8.

How We Helped

Living Style Guide

Starwood Retail is a rapidly growing company, and they needed a site that had the flexibility to grow with them. We took the beautiful static designs provided by Petrick and extended them into a responsive style guide that informed the Drupal build. This robust browser-based style guide turned the design into components, so that new content can be published quickly as Starwood Retail continues to grow. This style guide now serves as a reference so that any future updates will still maintain the design system.

Flexibility in Drupal 8

After the style guide was created, it was translated into an easy-to-use Drupal interface. As we were building, we were able to show the Starwood Retail team how all of the components would come together, and we worked with them on help text, labels, and an organization that made sense to them. Since they were in on the process, it makes it easier for them to carry forward.

The new site is easier to understand and easier to populate. In the previous site, contact information would have to be updated in each location that it was present on the site. On the new site, if you update a piece of content, it will update that node across the whole site. Another example is that when a new mall page is added, that mall is automatically added to their location map (shown below).

“We have a great corporate website now that everyone is really proud of, and it functions exactly how we wanted it to.” - Brian Price, Digital Marketing Manager

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