Jan Forster

Finding the home to make your own

Established in 2004, Jan Forster is recognised as a market-leading estate agent in the North East, with an enviable reputation for achieving results. Jan Forster aims to make the buying and selling process as easy as possible through professional service from start to finish, in-depth knowledge of the local areas and a committed team.

JUMP’s aim was to understand Jan Forster’s professional, yet personal approach and showcase this in their new brand identity and bespoke website.

A quietly confident brand

JUMP first worked with Jan Forster in 2012 but after 10 years, a redesign of their brand identity was procured as their business had grown.

We began the project by refining their logo with the aim of streamlining the buying and selling process at the forefront of the new logo identity. The client wanted to retain the previous logo’s look and feel as Jan Forster is a recognised market leader in the North East. We retained their brand colours of grey and orange, updated the font, adjusted the weight and kerning, and dropped the supporting text as Jan Forster is recognisable in a stand-alone matter.

The icon was also given a refresh with the theme of “moving on up”; the icon reflects the rooflines from the original logo while also now pointing upwards, relating to both buyers and sellers moving towards their goals.

A sub-brand to emphasise luxury

As well as the estates brand, JUMP also created and established Jan Forster’s premium property sub-brand. After looking into the theme of “curation”, we settled on the name Remarkable with the strapline, “Extra not ordinary”.

The sub-brand needed to be attached to Jan Forster but elevated into a luxury and premium area. To fit the premium feel, we moved forward with a modern serif font which stood out amongst competitors. The logo was complemented with a teal colour palette which sat alongside the Jan Forster grey very nicely, eluding to luxury.

Jan Forster can now use the remarkable brand to help elevate specific properties, as well as target a specific subset of audiences who are looking to enter a more premium version of Jan Forster offers.

A bespoke filter mapping solution

It was important that the newly refined brand was reflected in an equally streamlined and user-friendly website. JUMP designed and built a custom solution that ensured users would find everything they were looking for within property search, on the Jan Forster website. The design was bright and modern, incorporating hints of the brand orange and introducing refreshed lifestyle imagery, which could keep users calm yet enthusiastic about their search throughout the process. 

Property search via a map was key for both buyers and renters, and an ideal feature for Jan Forster to have as their own. So, JUMP created a bespoke map-based search feature. This feature allowed users to define their search with pinpoint accuracy. JUMP developers coded updated area guides, testimonials, and extensive branch information into the map feature, which reinforced Jan Forster’s customer-first approach, cementing the site as a vital source of local housing knowledge and expertise.

Capturing moving moments

To inject further personality into the new brand, JUMP crafted a set of unique illustrations that embellished panels of the new website, capturing familiar moments in the house-moving process.

Using tones of orange, grey and teal, the illustrations depicted everything from surf cafes and sofas to picture frames and pets. Each Jan Forster branch was drawn in the quirky, flat-graphic style, creating a library of assets that could be rolled out across digital, print and social media.

Digital presence persistence

As Jan Forster Estates already had a strong online presence with a well-established existing customer base, it was crucial to ensure that this persisted when migrating to the new website. It was especially important to mirror the long-standing property search URLs, which can have various dynamic query strings, which are based on the selected property search parameters.

To achieve this, the JUMP team did thorough SEO exercises to make sure that while the new site offered various UX improvements to guarantee a swift and seamless experience for the user, most of the URLs would remain identical. For the pages that couldn’t persist in the legacy URLs, permanent redirects were added to avoid dead ends on the website which could create a dip in traffic.

Furthermore, extensive sitemaps were created to ensure that the content-rich website reaches audiences that were actively searching for housing. This resulted in a successful set-up and re-engagement of the already established trust with search engines, like Google and continuous site traffic to ensure organic traffic was directed to the correct pages on the site.