One Site for Investors, One for Students

One website trying to serve two audiences

ADOWA were running one website and asking it to do two completely different jobs: impress property investors weighing up ADOWA Property Developers, and help a student find a room and apply for it. Those are opposite audiences with opposite needs, and a single site served neither of them well. They needed custom website development in Johannesburg that stopped forcing one page to be everything, so they brought ThinkStory in to split the site in two.

• One site trying to speak to investors and students at once
• A corporate audience and a student audience with opposite priorities
• Students on patchy, expensive mobile data the old site ignored

Students and investors want opposite things

An investor wants credibility: the company, the track record, the numbers behind ADOWA Property Developers. A student wants the opposite: no corporate preamble, just the residences, the prices and a fast way to apply. Trying to satisfy both on one page meant every visitor waded through information meant for someone else. The result was a page that half-worked for everyone and fully worked for no one. Splitting them let each site say only what its audience actually came for. Every extra second of load and every irrelevant paragraph is a reason for one of the two audiences to leave.

Two platforms, built separately

So we built two Webflow sites with custom content management behind them. One is the corporate platform for ADOWA Property Developers, built to reassure investors and partners. The other is ADOWA Living, the student-facing portal, built around residences in Johannesburg and Pretoria, prices, and a clear path to apply. Same brand, two front doors, each tuned to the person walking through it.

Built to load on a weak connection

The best detail is one most people never notice. We built the student portal for low-bandwidth conditions, because a lot of South African students browse on patchy, expensive mobile data, often far from campus. A site that loads slowly is a site a student gives up on, so we built the student platform to open quickly even on a weak connection, which for this audience is not a nicety, it is the difference between an application and a bounce.

A FAQ that answers before anyone asks

The last piece was a FAQ that does real work. We built a searchable FAQ database for the student portal and translated it into three South African languages, isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sepedi, so a student can get an accurate answer in the language they think in, without having to phone or email. It answers the common questions before anyone has to ask them, which takes load off the ADOWA team and gets students to the thing they came for: a room, and a way to apply for it. An answer a student can read in their home language, at midnight, without waiting for office hours, is worth more than a phone number.

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