Third Party Designers: Hire for Implementation

This guide is for designers, design agencies, marketing teams, or other third parties handling a website design using the RealtyNinja platform and you would like our team to implement your design. This is a great option if you want your client to have a consistent look and feel across marketing you may have already developed for them, including their website, but don’t want to learn the ins-and-outs of our unique platform in order to implement your design.

Our customization terms and conditions apply as a baseline for this service. Everything below is additional information for the special requirements when working with third parties, or is simply a “plain english” definition of the processes described within. We treat every third-party design as a Fully-Customized Design, quoting accordingly for the time needed, regardless of the base you choose to start with due to the level of communication, detail and time required to complete these projects.

Important things to know:

Our design team will put reasonable effort into reproducing provided mockups, but cannot guarantee pixel-perfect application. The nature of mobile-first and responsive web design, coupled with our template-based website framework, make it very difficult (or in some cases impossible) to replicate mockups exactly once they have been converted into a functional website rendered in-browser.
We understand how important your branding is and will do our best to adhere to brand guidelines including the usage of logos, fonts and colours. Our primary goal is to make sure your brand is well represented and there is continuity between your website design and your other brand elements, but make no guarantees that your brand requirements will be met in all cases. Please see the information regarding fonts below before purchasing webfont files for use on your RealtyNinja site from a foundry or other third-party.
There may be times where our underlying website platform cannot accommodate particular features or functions required by you or your client. In the event we identify discrepancies between our platform and client expectations we will make reasonable effort to inform you (or your client) and try to find suitable alternatives.
In an effort to keep projects moving smoothly, we expect third party designers (or agencies, etc.) to relay all communication internally with their client. If working and communicating on behalf of your client, then we expect that all limitations and requirements are discussed internally before they're communicated with our team.

Your discovery period & information architecture

Finalizing your site plan and necessities is key. Your first step will be to either submit the Step 1: Setup form found in the backend of your client's site and have our team set up the client site pages and settings for you, or proceed to setting it up yourself. This will help you recognize if you need our team’s design services on subpages, such as for custom styling on Buying or Selling pages.

Communication

Communication for the customization is done through email or scheduled calls with the design team. Feedback and comments are provided via email so it is easily referenced by the team, and may include screenshots uploaded as file attachments to your email, and links to your references. Looms or other uploaded videos are accepted but not preferred as it is not as efficient to work with or reference.

The Customer Support team (support@realtyninja.com) can be called, chatted with, or emailed regarding site setup, listing data, platform questions, etc., basically anything outside of the design customization service.

Providing us with mockups and assets

The information required for your project will need to be provided via the "Step 2: Design" form in the backend of your client’s website. It is preferred that your designers use one of our PSD templates, but Illustrator or Figma files are also accepted. We request a jpeg and the editable file, packaged so all assets are found by the program. Please email us at info@realtyninja.com letting us know which template file you would like (generic or one of our semi-customs). Mockups are only requested for desktop sizes as our sites are mobile-first.

Please provide us with approved mockups as that is what we will be quoting our time for. Major changes, such as changes made to the layout or brand details will be quoted and paid for before proceeding with the changes. If custom subpages are requested, you may wish to provide us with a complete mockup for them as well.

Text can be "lorem ipsum" placeholder but we recommend starting your content creation before sending us the mockup as there is the chance that the content may affect your layout once written.

You may also wish to provide us with references for hover effects, animation, and any special interactivity required for your design to be implemented properly so we know what time and skills would be necessary to make your vision happen.

We will also need access to your stock photos, logos and graphics, and appropriate webfonts (names of ones available on Adobe or Google Fonts, or links to self-hosted files). Please note that as we are a closed platform we are unable to host webfont files and cannot guarantee the usage of specific fonts.

Example submission details (via Step 2: Design form):

Style keywords: Bold, confident, elegant, with neutral colours
Target audience: Young home investors in Calgary between 25-40, homeowners looking to purchase a townhouse or condo unit.
Goal/main call to action: To gain buyer leads for attached homes in Calgary
Specific requests and other notes: I would like to have an MLS Search widget on the homepage that allows people to subscribe to get newest listings, I would like fade in animation to be used on the main headings of the sections, I would like the contact information section to include the agent’s headshot. Primary call to action buttons should be similar in action to [link], animations for the headings similar to [link]

[Mockup and assets uploaded to realtyninja.wetransfer.com or via the uploaders on the last page of the form which include fonts available through Adobe Fonts]

We generally quote by estimating the time that will be needed to implement the homepage & setup of the overall design that affects the whole site, which includes communication time. Then we quote for any requested subpage design separately. Because we ask for payment in full before proceeding with the work, if subpages are involved we will ask for the homepage portion separately as the first payment, and once that’s complete we will invoice/charge for the subpages before moving onto those next steps.

If anything in your mockup is not possible for us to implement due to platform limitations, we will let you know and do our best to suggest possible solutions before you can approve the project to begin, so we can make sure our platform will be a good fit for your project. Our general timeline for implementing third party designs can range from just 1 week (5 business days) to over 4 weeks, depending on how many revisions there are, communication/approval delays as well as content delivery.

Post-implementation to launch

Once your design has been applied by our team, we do expect there to be some changes requested. Generally, changes are considered part of the customization if they are thoughts and feedback related to differences you may notice in our implementation versus the mockup, keeping in mind those possible discrepancies and necessary changes so that your design fits our platform’s responsive web structure.

Changes requested outside of the mockups provided will be quoted for at our hourly rate of $120+tax and will need to be listed in an email for us to quote for them appropriately. We aim to complete your changes within a timely manner, ranging from one to four business days depending on the complexity and amount.

For most projects, once the main implementation is complete you will be working with our general Customer Support team to finalize your content setup.

Technical details to consider:

RealtyNinja runs on a closed platform. We cannot custom develop special functionality (refer to our Tour page below) or edit the underlying structure.
Please ensure fonts are on Google or Adobe font systems, or that you can provide us with a link to self-hosted (or foundry-hosted) files.
Our (Katana) website platform does not have an automatically updated footer navigation section. We can create a custom footer with space for page links that will need to be manually updated by you or the client via the editor.
Please review our general page editing help docs to understand the formatting that is available through the editor itself (ie. not through CSS changes)
Katana is styled to be mobile-first responsive, meaning there is no dedicated mobile site and major changes in functionality between screen sizes is not available. We will be making sure that your design is fluid between sizes and tested for browser compatibility.

Third-party design examples

Here are some recent examples of third-party designs we've implemented for clients