Avenue is a tech start-up that builds beautiful, lead-generating websites and manages targeted online advertising to help realtors grow their business. I spent 1.5+ years working as a designer on the Avenue Team. During this time, I completed a wide variety of design tasks including logo design & branding packages, real estate brochures, infographics, poster design, and social media digital assets—but my primary day-to-day task was to create and maintain websites for Avenue’s hundreds of realtor clients.
For each new client, the design team would receive a WordPress template that was originally created by Avenue’s engineering team. Our task was then to add components and style the website into a fully functional, appealing portrayal of each Realtor’s offerings and personality. While this WordPress theme included all the tools and functionality needed for a real estate website, unfortunately some aspects of the template had begun to look dated, and didn’t have a lot of customization ability.
To get around this, the design team learned how to alter the template using custom HTML and CSS. We built an entire library of easy-to-use code snippets that we could quickly implement and reuse in each new website. I enjoyed this aspect of work so much that I found myself researching and playing around with new CSS design ideas in my spare time. Using these custom codes allowed us to add more interactivity and a higher level of design to our sites, which also helped us avoid making hundreds of cookie-cutter realtor websites.
To allow clients to enjoy Avenue’s services as quickly as possible (and boost Avenue’s MRR), the design team had a target turnaround time of only three hours per initial website design.
This was constantly a challenge. We had a lot to fit into three hours:
This constant level of striving, streamlining, and experimenting made what could have become a repetitive, mundane day-to-day workflow remain fun and exciting.