TurnKey Site Rebuild
In January of 2018 I was hired on at TurnKey to lead the redevelopment of the TurnKey website from the ground-up. At the time, TurnKey was already managing thousands of vacation rentals across the country, but their website remained virtually the same as it was from their earliest stages as a startup. Despite being an important channel for sales and reservations, it wasn’t up to par with TurnKey’s growth as a brand or where it was going.
TurnKeyvr.com in 2017, via Wayback Machine
The goals of the rebuild were as follows:
Move to a modern tech stack that will allow for rapid development, iteration, performance and maintainability (React Javascript)
Create a new geo-based search application that would scale as TurnKey added thousands of homes across the nation
Revamp the reservation funnel with an improved UX, focused on mobile/responsive design
Bake SEO features into our new Market/City pages, the primary drivers of inbound traffic
Partner with Marketing and Design to implement new TurnKey branding
Rebuilding a car while you’re still driving
In order to see the results of the new-and-improved website sooner, we decided to take an iterative approach, integrating sections of the new site with the old as they were finished, page by page. While this allowed us to see material gains in our primary metrics faster than waiting for the whole site to be finished, it also presented major product and engineering challenges. Akin to rebuilding a car while you’re driving, we needed to make sure that the two web applications worked seamlessly together, smoothly passing users between them on their journey through the funnel. Pulling this off required extensive long-term planning over the course of a year and a half till completion.
This approach also required negotiating between making immediate improvements to the existing application or deferring those for the new site. Any work on the current site was an opportunity cost eating resources that could be used on the rebuild, and would ultimately be replaced anyway. However, business stakeholders (Marketing, CX, Revenue, Sales, etc.) had more immediate website needs that couldn’t wait for the new site’s completion, so I worked closely with these teams to determine what could and couldn’t wait and plan accordingly.
A data-informed rebuild
While some of the UX improvements to the new site were obvious, we wanted to take an informed approach to the many changes we were making on the new site. Having installed VWO, a front-end A/B testing framework, non-developers including myself and the Marketing team were able to test out and validate changes we had planned for the new site without using any engineering resources. This included layout, imagery, and copy, including a focus on validating TK’s new brand value propositions.
Responsive, Mobile Focus
One of the main goals of the site rebuild was to implement a responsive, mobile-first design. Despite 50% (and growing) of traffic coming from mobile devices, the old TurnKey site was designed with the desktop experience in mind and had major issues on mobile and tablet screens.
We built the new TK site from the ground-up with mobile in mind, utilizing a responsive layout grid and other responsive design best practices to ensure a quality experience on all devices.
The new TurnKeyvr.com
Within a year of starting the rebuild our small tech team had completed and launched the reservation funnel on the new site, from landing pages to search to checkout. It took us about another six months to rebuild homeowner sales and miscellaneous pages and finally sunset the old website.
Read more about individual rebuild projects here:
Implementing Geo-Search
Landing pages
Unit pages