Background
Gentoo Group is a housing association and new homes provider serving communities across Sunderland and the wider North East, and its digital estate supports both social housing customers and prospective buyers exploring new-build homes through Gentoo Homes. The two websites sat at very different levels of maturity, with Gentoo Group already running on Umbraco and supported internally, while Gentoo Homes was a brochure site with no content management system. Even minor updates needed a developer, which meant the Marketing & Communications team couldn't respond quickly when sales priorities changed.
Gentoo was looking for a long-term partner to help shape a vision for its digital services, get more from Umbraco, build internal capability and put both platforms on a more secure, maintainable and scalable footing. Gentoo Homes also needed to work harder as a lead-generation platform, since buying a home is a considered decision and the site had to present developments and properties clearly, with strong visual impact on desktop and mobile.
Solution
We began with a technical review of both sites, covering source code, database structure, client-side assets, security and the existing Umbraco set-up, which meant urgent risks could be addressed straight away while the remaining findings fed into a forward roadmap. Both sites were then migrated to Umbraco Cloud as a multi-site estate on a single managed platform, giving Gentoo a more resilient hosting and deployment model while each site kept its own identity. Introducing Umbraco behind Gentoo Homes also gave the Marketing and Communications team direct control of its content for the first time.
A collaborative UX workshop helped the team test assumptions and agree what homebuyers actually need from the site, and from there we built a reusable component library with Umbraco's Block Grid Editor. It covers navigation, calls to action, property cards, development details, image galleries, key features and enquiry forms, each behaving consistently across screen sizes and letting editors build engaging pages without a developer. Delivery ran in two-week sprints, with tested components released into user acceptance testing each time, so content population could begin alongside the build rather than waiting for the end.
Impact
Gentoo now has a more secure, maintainable and flexible estate supporting both its housing association and new homes businesses, and the results show in the numbers, with user engagement up 39%, views per active user up 10% and form submissions up 38%. Gentoo Homes has moved beyond its original minimum viable platform into a richer, mobile-first experience, and the people closest to its customers and sales goals now control its content day to day.
New content and journeys can be introduced quickly without a return to bespoke development, and the partnership continues through Shout's managed service, combining proactive monitoring and maintenance with regular conversations about performance and priorities.
Results
“I actually don't worry about the website anymore. Shout have it entirely in hand. 10/10 would recommend!”
