Whitelabel Website Product

Background: TurnKey had a number of large, multiunit clients with their own branded web presence and marketing teams. This included resort communities, condominium buildings, bed and breakfasts, hotels, and HOAs. As part of signing these clients, our Sales team promised custom “whitelabel” booking sites that the client could either integrate with their own website as a booking engine, or use as their own website entirely.

The original version of the whitelabel (Whitelabels v1) were clones of the original TurnKey site (that my team rebuilt in 2018-19) but modified to use the client site’s styles, including logos, colors, fonts, links, images, navigation, and copy.

All of this was built and maintained manually by the TurnKey website team. Not only was each new site a significant time investment (1-2 weeks depending on the scope of the modifications) but maintenance also became a problem: as clients made changes and redesigns to their own sites, they expected their custom TurnKey Whitelabel site to reflect the changes. The lack of a standard procedure for requesting changes meant a messy back-and-forth between the client, their in-house CR, and TurnKey’s tech team, with no clear division of ownership. And without a firm agreement on an acceptable scope for additional modification work or set timelines for delivery, we were at the mercy of the client’s whims. In several instances a client’s marketing team would spring complete redesigns on us out of the blue, with unrealistic due dates that interrupted the website team’s roadmap.

Finally, all of our whitelabels were built using the old website’s codebase, which was not only difficult to develop on but had all kinds of technical and UI bugs.

One of the original whitelabel sites

Whitelabels v2

In early 2020 I began advocating for a complete revamp of our whitelabel offering. Rather than treating these as one-off microsite clones, this would be a new product built from the ground up to solve the problems of the previous version and deliver greater satisfaction to our clients. The basic requirements were:

• Re-use new TK website tech stack - the new whitelabels would make use of the new technology powering the TK website, sharing code and components. This meant an improved UI, performance, maintainability, and would make it easy to push changes from the main app over to whitelabels.

• Configurable Templates - rather than offer open-ended customization, Whitelabel v2 pages would be powered by templates taken from the new site, but with the option to configure different attributes in order to mimic the client brand’s styling. Structured configuration would not only allow us to create and maintain new sites faster, but would ease communication with the client and clarify the scope of possible modification. Rather than back-and-forth with the client’s Marketing team, we were able to ask for a set list of modifications.

• Powered by CMS - the configuration of a new whitelabel would be done within our CMS, and not require an engineer. Internal users at TurnKey could add and edit the configuration options themselves. This would reduce the time needed to create a new whitelabel site from weeks to hours.

Whitelabel v2 for Illume Nashville

Whitelabel v2 for Adina Austin

The Reserve at St Charles Bay Whitelabel v2

Configuration options

The following were configurable on any whitelabel:

Navigation Bar Options

• Nav Format

  • Left aligned or Centered

• Nav Logo

• Nav Logo Link

• Nav Links

  • URL

  • Label

• Nav background color

• Nav font

  • Must be Google Font

• Nav font color

• Color bar

  • Yes/No

• Color Bar Color

Hero Area Options (also called 'Heading')

• Button Color

• Calendar color

• Hero Image

  • Min 2000 px

• Hero title

• Hero title font

  • Must be Google Font

• Hero text color

• Hero Title Background Color

Page Body Options

• Body text font

  • Must be Google Font

• Body text color

• Subheading Font

  • Must be Google Font

• Subheading Font Color

• Body Background Color

• Body Copy

• Body Link Color

• Latitude and Longitude for Map

Footer Options

• Logo

• Logo link

• Footer background color

• Footer Links

  • URL

  • Label

• Footer font

• Footer font color

Results

Clients, Sales, and Client Reps were extremely happy with the new look and feel of Whitelabels v2, further reinforcing TurnKey’s image as a technological innovator in the vacation rentals space.

The ease of launching and maintaining the new whitelabels meant that they no longer ate up precious dev time, and could be delivered to a client much faster.

Standardizing the configuration options improved communication between the client and internal teams at TurnKey. In fact, this interaction could be reduced to the client simply filling out a form with their chosen configuration variables. Sales could also provide clear expectations for the site from the beginning.

Direct competitors did not have a comparable product, giving TurnKey a sales advantage. And now that the effort involved in launching a new Whitelabel had been massively reduced, Sales was encouraged to use it as a standard sales tool, offering a whitelabel site to any multiunit client, including clients with a much smaller unit count than would have previously qualified. We quickly expanded the number of whitelabels by multiples.