Real estate website design for Indochina Capital

Indochina Capital has worked in real estate investment and financial services since 1999. The website serves as a company profile for international partners and investors, and it is not a sales channel. Three constraints follow from that: flawless visuals, English/Vietnamese bilingual content, and fast loading for visitors abroad.

Bilingual: two independent versions, one shared structure

A common mistake on bilingual sites is to treat the English version as a "translation" of the Vietnamese one, forcing the two to match paragraph by paragraph. An investment firm can't work that way: a press release for foreign partners differs from a news post for the domestic market, and some content exists in only one language.

The structure I chose lets the two versions differ in content while staying in sync on structure: the same set of pages, the same data types, different content. When the communications team publishes a Vietnamese post that has no English version yet, navigation keeps working.

Investment projects presented as a portfolio

In high-end real estate, the photos do most of the persuading. So the project catalogue uses a portfolio layout: large images, generous white space, concise information.

Each project is its own data type with fixed fields: location, property type, scale, status. Visitors can filter the list page, and editors don't have to remember a format. Alongside it sit the leadership team profiles and a timeline of company milestones, two sections institutional investors always read.

Speed when the visitor is half a world away from the server

Visitors come from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and the US. For someone far away, network latency adds up and a heavy page gets much slower, starting with the very first visit.

I handled it with three measures, in decreasing order of impact:

• Full-page caching on the server, so each view doesn't rebuild the HTML
• Image sizes matched to each display slot, instead of loading the original image and shrinking it with CSS
• Cutting third-party scripts as far as possible

The third one often gets skipped. A few tracking snippets and widgets whose numbers nobody reads can weigh more than the rest of the page combined.