The challenge

WIN Home Inspection (WIN) was founded in 1993 in Seattle, Washington, and has developed into a network of more than 190 locations in 33 states, making it one of the fastest growing home inspection companies today.

WIN needed to upgrade their entire franchise marketing platform infrastructure. They were looking to grow their business and better support their existing franchisees, as well as WIN customers. Their existing WordPress Multisite platform was not meeting their needs. It was hard for franchisees to manage their content, and even harder for the corporate office to enforce company standards and publish national communications. They also needed a proper mobile experience, as their customers use mobile phones more than most.

This all meant a complete redesign of the user experience from all perspectives, and building a powerful platform that could grow with them for years to come for almost 300 franchises.

WIN Home Inspection

Industry

  • Home inspection services

Project timeline

  • 12 weeks for MVP

Fynydd services

  • API integrations
  • Bandwidth and traffic analysis
  • CMS development
  • Github source code repository management
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Server security audit
  • Technical research, consulting
  • User experience strategy and design
  • User interface design
  • Web app hosting

The result

We implemented Umbraco CMS as the core publishing platform, as well as a tight integration with Google Maps. This allowed us to create a user experience that was both easy to use for customers, and easy to manage for franchisees. Even the site content management features are fully functional on a mobile device.

The corporate office can control franchise-wide communications, while franchisees can make their websites their own through content and promotions. The authoring experience is streamlined so business owners can focus on writing content, while the platform keeps the format attractive. We also helped streamline the analytics pipeline and integrity by establishing subdomains for the franchisee locations, and running Umbraco in a multi-site mode.

Postmark was used to send transactional email to customers requesting appointments. And all of this is hosted in a secure Amazon EC2 environment with RDS data storage, incremental backups, and a potent firewall.

Summary

  • Umbraco CMS hosted at Amazon EC2
  • Google maps integration
  • Postmark transactional email service integration
  • Responsive HTML5 framework with a great mobile experience
  • Multi-site for centralized management
  • Hosted with AWS for performance and security

ROI

  • Increased national sales leads for home inspection franchisees
  • Almost 300 franchises managing their own sites
  • Customers can easily find their nearest WIN home inspector
  • Very happy client and customers!