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Nest Bend Real Estate is a luxury real estate website serving the Bend, Oregon market. The project began as a complete replacement for an existing WordPress site that had become difficult to manage and was struggling across several important areas, including security, accessibility, performance, usability, and content management.

I rebuilt the website from the ground up using Drupal 8, creating a more structured and maintainable platform while completely rethinking the customer-facing experience. Since the original launch, I have continued to maintain and modernize the application, including successfully upgrading it to Drupal 10.

A major component of the project was integrating the website with iHomeFinder, an MLS-based real estate service. The integration allows property listings to flow automatically into the website, giving visitors access to current real estate inventory while also allowing featured properties to be incorporated directly into areas such as the homepage. This eliminated the need for the client to manually maintain property information while creating a much more cohesive experience between the company's brand and its property listings.

The visual experience was particularly important. Nest Bend operates in an affluent and highly competitive Oregon real estate market, so the website needed to communicate the same level of quality and professionalism that clients expect when buying or selling high-value properties. The redesigned site uses strong photography, clean typography, spacious layouts, and a video-driven homepage hero to showcase both available properties and the Central Oregon lifestyle.

Content marketing was also built directly into the platform. The client can publish blog articles and podcast episodes through Drupal, allowing the website to function as more than a property-search tool. These capabilities provide an ongoing source of useful, indexable content while giving the company a platform for establishing expertise within the local real estate market.

One of the project's biggest successes has been organic search performance. By replacing the previous site with a better structured, technically sound Drupal implementation and placing greater emphasis on content architecture, performance, accessibility, and search-engine optimization, the website experienced significant growth in SEO-driven traffic.

Nest Bend Real Estate demonstrates how a website rebuild can go beyond simply changing platforms. The project transformed a difficult-to-maintain WordPress installation into a modern digital marketing and real estate platform designed around maintainability, automated property data, content marketing, search visibility, and a polished customer experience.

Key Technologies & Capabilities

Drupal · PHP · iHomeFinder · MLS Integration · API Integration · SEO · Accessibility · Responsive Design · Video Integration · Content Architecture · Blogging · Podcast Publishing · Drupal Migrations & Upgrades · WordPress-to-Drupal Migration

Northwest Tree Service is one of the most recognizable small businesses in Port Orchard and the South Kitsap Area. Ron Rider, Owner of Northwest Tree Service, needed a refresh on his website along with a re-visit of his 'Marketing' plan that he was buying through a legacy phone-book service.

Ron's new site is mobile friendly with simple explanations and call-outs to services that his company provides. Ron is able to easily create blogs and upload images and videos of his work without having to do it the 'old' way. He simply logs in, adds content and saves. No more worry about formatting, creating menu items, customizing layout or any of those tasks that came with little support from discount web hosting.

Northwest Tree Service is built on a Drupal 8 platform and lives on an AWS server hosted by Webazzle. Using the Ubercart suite of Modules the site is able to take simple payments for work done through PayPal. While any sort of payment method online needs security, the simple nature of the process brings his users to his PayPal business account to complete payment so they know their information is secure while staying mostly within the context of the site. Using the same base theme as the Webazzle site, Northwest Tree Service uses the Bootstrap framework for layout and design elements while also using custom module development for extra design and functionality features.

Usable web content was slim-pickings during the initial build of the new site, but with the use of predefined templates and a well thought out content structure we were able to make the site more engaging and easier to understand.

As Ron and his team collect more images and establish a social media presence, the Northwest Tree Service website will be an excellent marketing tool when others are looking for trusted service.