Crystalcore builds websites for land brokers in Texas, the people selling ranches, farms, hunting land and rural acreage. Their clients had spent years building those businesses on personal contact, and most arrived with no brand and nothing online worth finding. Crystalcore built for other industries too, all of it custom.
Then buyers started looking for land the way they look for everything else. A broker who did not come up in a search for hunting land in Texas was invisible to the person with the money.
Crystalcore could build any of them a site. Five years into working together I was still the only designer on all of it, drawing each one from scratch, and a broker could not pay what that cost.
Mike, the owner, and I worked it out between us. Land Broker Websites already did custom high end real estate sites and would carry on doing them. What it did not have was anything to sell the broker whose budget stopped well short of that.
So, a template system inside the same line. Around fifty templates that could be mixed and matched, fitted to whatever brand a broker already had, or giving them one where there was none. A broker picked, their logo and photographs went in, and they never had to open a tool or learn one.
The whole line ran on Crystalcore’s own platform, which pulled MLS listings in automatically, so a broker’s land was on their site without anyone typing it there. The commercial shape, a low start and a steady monthly fee after, was Mike’s decision.
Brokers bought the template product in numbers that building one at a time could never have reached. These were businesses that would never have commissioned a site from nothing, and they ended up with one that got found.
It changed the custom sale too. A broker looking at the standard could see exactly where it stopped, and the ones who wanted past it had something concrete to want past. The expensive work got easier to sell because the cheap work existed.
It is still running today on the same backbone, with the tooling modernised since. That is a long life for anything on the web.
“Fifteen years, and I’d take him back tomorrow. Zoltán didn’t ask for more designers, he designed the system that’s still running two hundred sites later.”
Mike Ciesinsky, CEO, Crystalcore.net
So that got made too. Across fifteen years the work covered brand identities, logos and type for brokers who had none, the websites themselves, and the graphic work around them.
It went wider than land. Rural real estate, farms and ranches, tourism, and industries with nothing to do with any of it, all of it built custom.
Crystalcore wrote and ran the platform. The creative direction over what a broker and his buyers actually looked at was mine.
Powered Storage
A brand system built to keep splitting as the demand shows up.
Schropp
One identity, and sub-brands separated by colour alone.
