PROJECT
Capital & Regional Website
After emerging from a period of restructuring Capital & Regional, a public listed UK property REIT, needed to demonstrate it’s new direction and breath renewed life into its brand.
Background and project objectives
Capital & Regional is a leading UK property REIT, with assets valued at over £1billion. They own and manage a portfolio of 9 shopping centres with footfall in excess of 90 million a year, plus the SnoZone group of indoor snow slopes that has taught over 1 million people to ski and snowboard.
The group has gone through dramatic changes following the financial crisis resulting in a major restructuring and refocusing of the business. C&R needed to cement it’s new direction and present an updated public face of the business.
New information structure
Work on the new site began with a restructuring exercise. At the time information aimed at retailers, advertisers and commercial partners was included in each shopping centre site. This approach is fine for standalone centres, but we needed to make C&R a more visible parent brand. Consumer focused sites would focus on just that, while all business and commercial information was moved up a level to the new parent brand site.
Platform
Recently other sites in the Capital & Regional group have been built using Umbraco as the CMS. Umbraco has good support for widget content structures meaning layouts can easily be duplicated and elements mixed and matched to create new pages without additional agency support. This aids rapid and cost-effective content creation.
Of Colour & Code’s Kris Hunt was the client lead on the project and the agency was Frame.
A key objective was to showcase the redevelopment and refurbishment work being carried across the shopping centres. This work is part of a capital expenditure program aimed at improving the shopping environment to drive footfall, optimise the retail space for new tenants and improve the asset value of the schemes. The content widgets in Umbraco help to easily develop case study pages with a variety of content types.
The site includes a number of content elements to satisfy the investor and retail partner audiences, including: Region-locked content areas for restricting access to documentation by country Share price and RNS announcement feeds Retailer-only extranet for distribution of support documents
Before & after
![](https://www.ofcolourandcode.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CapReg-oldsite.png)
![](https://www.ofcolourandcode.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CapReg-newsite.png)