How Drupal multisite powers Mayfield and Audley Villages
Two sites, one solution
Mayfield Villages is the sister brand of Audley Villages, and part of Audley Group, whose marketing team we have had the pleasure of working closely with for several years now. Both brands build and manage retirement villages which provide choice and independence to older people. Able to own their own home in a beautiful setting, surrounded by like-minded neighbours, integrated retirement communities are leading the way in retirement living. While Audley Villages specialises in restoring heritage buildings into luxury retirement villages, Mayfield’s style is modern apartments and city living.
New brand, new website
As they approached the launch of the first site in Watford, and with a gorgeous new brand to implement, the Mayfield team came to us to help. Samantha Happe, Digital Marketing Manager at Audley Group, had clear objectives for the new site:
- The new Mayfield site should reflect the same modern design of our first village and do justice to the gorgeous new brand design
- It should stand out from the Audley Villages website and other websites in the Integrated Retirement Community sector
- The website should enable visitors to envisage what life is like in a Mayfield Village and turn their interest into captured leads
- From a practical point of view, it was vital for Sam and her team to have total control over content editing without compromising the visual or user experience
- It also needed to be as easy for them to edit and manage as their existing Audley Villages website
- From a budget perspective, the team wanted to make the most of the investment they'd already made in the Audley Villages website
Our solution to these requirements was to use Drupal's 'multisite' feature. This smart solution lets us share all of the great features of www.audleyvillages.co.uk with Mayfield Villages without compromising the uniqueness of its brand identity. The two sites act as siblings rather than identical twins, and the team can switch on or off their preferred features for each site. Any new features and functionality we create for the Audley site are immediately available for Mayfield, and vice versa. Sam and her team have the ease of a familiar editing experience, but in the coding equivalent of a clever party trick, the outward appearance and structure of the two sites are distinctively different.
Tools for a fast-moving digital marketing team
Retirement living is a fast-growing sector, which requires innovative marketing, and the marketing team at Audley need to be able to move quickly, testing and refining how they engage with their audience, without waiting for a technical team to do the work for them. Having the right tools and the right level of independent control over their website is vital, and that's what the multi-site approach has given them.
Our flexible, component-based page builder gives their in-house team full control over the user experience. Flexible navigation, tagging, and categorisation let them guide users to relevant content, and powerful form-building tools give them plenty of opportunity to engage directly with their prospective owners. The site is even integrated with Audley's CRM, Salesforce, so that they can follow owners from their first interaction through to moving into their new Mayfield home.
The new Mayfield site allows the digital marketing team full creativity and control over form placement, the content the forms collect and how the CRM captures this. Other tools that save the team time every day include the smart media library for re-using and replacing images, videos and text snippets, the 'shared components' that let them re-use whole sections of pages, and AI-based automatic image tagging that helps them more easily maintain WCA AA accessibility on the site.
Two sites for the price of one (plus a bit)
As part of the procurement process for the Mayfield site, Audley considered a number of CMS platforms, including Drupal as used on the Audley Villages site. Development and ongoing maintenance costs are always important, and Sam wanted to be certain that the new site was built for long-term success as Mayfield Villages scaled up.
As Nik Roberts, our CEO and technical advocate for Audley explains, "Our development team reviewed a number of options, including starting from scratch with a more basic CMS, or cloning the Audley Villages Drupal 10 site and working with that.”
- In the end, the advantages of using the Drupal multisite feature were clear:
- Mayfield benefits from the many years of work that have been put into Audley Villages website, at a fraction of the cost
- New features or changes made to either site can be more readily re-configured for the other
- Security and performance upgrades can be shared automatically
- The familiar, easy-to-use editorial system with a flexible page builder is common across both sites
It's not quite 2-for-1 with the Audley and Mayfield websites, as the distinctive designs of each still mean some re-configuration when changes are made. And it still required a considerable time investment from the Mayfield team to load all of the unique, quality site content, but it's definitely closer to 2-for-1-and-a-bit.
Samantha Happe explains "The media library and the functionality to create components which can be shared across pages, are two invaluable features. We’re a small but very capable team in-house and the Drupal CMS has given us the flexibility we need to adapt to change as it happens and to drive forward our KPIs.”
Improving search engine visibility
The Mayfield Villages site is ultimately about showcasing the lifestyle of owners and how living there is enriching their lives, and encouraging new prospective owners to visit a village. Without search engine visibility, this wouldn't work, and there is always a concern that a wholesale website rebuild will harm SEO.
Page URLs and content can change, and without care this can lead to missing or broken user journeys, which search engines hate.
A plan to minimise the SEO impact of rebuilding the site was crucial, and our first step was a thorough audit. This highlighted the pages already attracting and retaining traffic, which keywords they ranked well for, and identified any poorly performing pages. Off the back of this audit and the data it revealed, the Mayfield team planned SEO improvements, including better page headings and titles, strengthened content and even better keywords to target. We applied new schemas to the content to help search engines understand the site better and deliver high-visibility search engine results page placements, such as featured local listings. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive SEO test and established 301 redirects for all pages no longer accessible on the new website.
What was the result?
It's early days, but after launching in March 2024, ready for the Mayfield Watford Village official launch event, the site has already seen a 20.4% growth in users compared to the three months before the launch. Engagement is up too, with over 93% of users on the top 5 pages triggering a conversion event or going on to explore multiple pages.
Feedback from the Mayfield team and from their customers has been fantastic too, with Samantha Happe, Head of Marketing for Audley Group saying "Visually, this is the most impressive site we've built. It perfectly reflects the brand and experience, is fully responsive for mobile users, and has been one of the smoothest website launches", and they're already seeing the benefits of the shared features of the two sites.
We love working with the smart bods at Versantus and this project was one of the least stressful and most rewarding to date
Samantha Happe, Digital Marketing Manager at Audley Group
What's next?
One of the reasons we love working with the team at Audley Group is that they are innovative and just as excited by what's possible with digital marketing as we are. We regularly meet to discuss new ideas that will maintain and improve their position as market leaders in the retirement living sector.
Coming up, this is bound to include more work around personalisation: offering the best experience for every visitor, performance and SEO: keeping at the top of search engine results, including considering how AI-generated search results might mix things up here, and differentiation: Audley and Mayfield are unique in their space, and there are plenty more opportunities to showcase the incredible lives that their homeowners lead in the enriching world of a Mayfield village or Audley village.
