Benchmark Communities builds several new communities each year, and each of these communities is a website unto itself. Our goal was to create a site that brought the brought all of the communities together under one cohesive brand image, with an intuitive back end that would allow multiple content contributors to maintain it.
A major challenge in this project was making it as easy as possible for the client to quickly generate a new portal for a community, with all its functionality and starter content. The design also had to allow easy alteration of page layouts for housing plans, and custom widgets, and to have that redesign translate across all communities. To accommodate these requirements we used a third party component, XMod forms to code up the administration interface and key layouts.
We created one parent site, BenchmarkCommunities.com, and 33 microsites with unique domains, one for each community. While we designed one cohesive organizational site, the scope of this project was really 34 independent websites, giving the organization the ability to add new sites as communities are created, as well as the ability to shut off a community as its homes sell out.