Hotel Childress Lofts started with nothing — no website, no listings presence, no way for anyone outside Childress to know the project existed. Hicks, Co had taken a 1928 landmark hotel that sat closed since the early 2000s and completely renovated it into twenty upscale loft apartments, and the building needed an audience to match the investment.
The first challenge was attention. Childress is a smaller city in the Texas panhandle, and a renovation of this scale was news — but only if people could find it. The site had to introduce the project, tell the story of the building’s transformation, and give the lofts a presence worthy of a five-story downtown landmark.
The second challenge was leasing. Renovated lofts only pay off when they’re occupied, so every page needed to move a prospective resident toward an inquiry. Floor plans, finishes, and photography had to do the selling; the contact form had to be one obvious step away from every page.
The third challenge was the story itself. This wasn’t generic apartment inventory — it was the Hotel Childress, a landmark with nearly a century of history behind it. The site had to treat the building’s past as an asset, because for this property, the history was the brand.
MasseyMedia designed and developed a responsive WordPress website that gave the Hotel Childress Lofts a presence from a standing start. For prospective residents, we built loft and floor-plan pages with photo galleries showcasing the one- and two-bedroom units — stainless steel appliances, custom-tiled bathrooms, and the exposed concrete ceilings that make the renovated hotel rooms unlike anything else in Childress.
Because the building itself is the brand, we gave its story a dedicated history section: the hotel’s 1928 opening, its decades as a hub for railroaders and Childress Army Airfield cadets, its decline and closure, and Hicks, Co’s acquisition and top-to-bottom renovation. That narrative turned a leasing site into something people in Childress wanted to share.
Every page was built to produce inquiries. With no online booking needed for long-term leases, we kept the path simple: clear calls to action leading to a contact form, with the property’s phone number visible throughout, so interested renters could reach the leasing team in one step.
MasseyMedia also handled hosting, email, and Local SEO for the property, so the lofts surfaced when anyone searched for apartments or lofts in Childress. The site launched in May 2023 and did what it was built to do — draw attention to the renovation, show off the lofts, and bring in resident inquiries — until the building was sold to another local developer.
Hotel Childress opened in downtown Childress on December 17, 1928, built by Security Investment Company — the firm of J. Martin Crews, a local banker, rancher, and businessman — and designed by noted Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick. The five-story hotel anchored the Childress skyline for decades, housing a barber shop, drug store, coffee shop, and a grand first-floor ballroom, and thrived as a hub for railroaders and cadets from the Childress Army Airfield through the 1940s. As the railroad declined, so did the hotel; it served as retirement apartments and later HUD housing before closing in the early 2000s. Hicks, Co acquired the landmark in 2016 and completed a total renovation, reopening it as twenty upscale loft apartments with first-floor retail and the offices of The Red River Sun, the local Childress newspaper. Hicks, Co has entrusted MasseyMedia with many of its websites over the years, and this one let us help give a 95-year-old Texas landmark its first-ever home on the web.
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