Mission-Driven Website Redesign for MassHousing
Mission-Driven Website Redesign for MassHousing
Spruce partnered with MassHousing, which provides homeownership and rental housing opportunities for residents of Massachusetts, to redesign and rebuild its website around the needs of the many audiences it serves.
Engagement Overview
Since 1966, MassHousing has helped Massachusetts residents buy and keep their homes. It offers affordable mortgages and down payment assistance to first-time buyers, and home improvement loans to existing homeowners. It also finances the building and preservation of affordable and mixed-income rental communities, and supports the property managers who run them. Through its financing and grant programs, the quasi-public agency invests in communities across the Commonwealth. That range means the MassHousing website has to serve people whose needs rarely overlap. Homebuyers, homeowners, developers, property managers and lenders all come to the same site, along with community leaders, renters and the general public.
As MassHousing approached its 60th anniversary in September 2026, the agency hired Spruce to create a modern, accessible website that reflects its brand and mission, with the anniversary as the target for launch. The site also had to grow with the agency’s programs and help each audience quickly find what it came for. Spruce led the engagement from start to finish. We began with stakeholder discovery and moved through information architecture, UX and visual design, content strategy, SEO and development on WordPress. The guiding idea of the project was to build the site around the goals of the people using it, not around the structure of the organization.
On the technical side, Spruce built a library of custom WordPress components and reusable patterns, so MassHousing’s team can build and update pages consistently. We connected the site to MassHousing’s forms and maps through APIs, embedded EverDwell forms for homebuyers, and tuned performance on Pantheon hosting with image optimization and logging. To move content off the old site, our developers built an automated migration tool that carried content from existing pages into the new templates, so the team could spend its time improving how each page reads. Spruce worked with MassHousing to make sure key landing pages performed well for search engine optimization (SEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), so users can find program information in both traditional search and AI-powered tools. Before launch, technical scans caught broken links and other errors, and Spruce supported MassHousing’s team with CMS training and an image upload guide. The new site launched in September 2026, meeting the agency’s 60th anniversary deadline.
Challenge
Over the years, the MassHousing website had come to mirror the agency’s internal structure. Content was organized by department, so visitors had to understand how MassHousing is set up before they could find the right program. A first-time homebuyer, a developer looking for financing and a property manager looking for compliance forms all started in the same place, with no clear path forward.
The agency’s many departments each served different audiences with different goals. Each department needed its programs represented fairly, but not at the expense of the most common tasks on the site. Much of the site’s most useful information lived in long PDFs that were hard to find, hard to read on a phone and invisible to search engines. Internal program names and industry jargon made it hard for visitors to tell which services applied to them. The site also didn’t clearly explain what MassHousing does: it is both a lender and a mission-driven public agency, and that story wasn’t coming through.
MassHousing had clear business goals as well. It wanted to recruit more partner lenders, show residents that owning a home is within reach, and keep its content visible as search engines and AI tools change how people find information.
Solution
Spruce began with discovery sessions with MassHousing’s core project team and each of its departments. From those conversations, we built eight user personas and mapped their journeys from first visit to next step. We then created a new sitemap organized around what visitors are trying to do, not which department handles it.
The old navigation mixed broad topics with audience labels. The new navigation uses action-oriented sections such as Buy a Home, Maintain Your Home, Create & Preserve Housing and Partner with MassHousing. Each section’s landing page gathers relevant programs from across the agency, so every department’s work appears where its audience is already looking. Audiences the agency doesn’t serve directly are handled with the same care. Renters, for example, often come to MassHousing for help, so Renter Resources explains what the agency does and points them to the right outside resources. The structure is built to grow, with clear guidelines for where new programs go and how they’re presented.
Spruce presented three visual directions to leadership and refined the chosen one into a warm, people-first design that features communities across Massachusetts. The flexible template library includes a takeover menu and in-page navigation that turns long PDFs into readable sections. It also includes clear pathways to partner lenders, homebuyer education and the right contact.
The responsive site was built on WordPress to meet WCAG accessibility standards, and contrast and keyboard checks were part of every design sign-off.
By launch, MassHousing had a website built around the people it serves: an accessible, scalable platform that gives every audience a clear path to the right program and tells the full story of the agency’s mission.
See the new MassHousing website in action.
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