♠ Lunalux.com ♠

Lunalux letterpress printing recently re-launched their website, with a fresh new look, logo, layout, and more. Jenni Undis, the store owner, came to us a while back and asked us for advice in terms of what we could do to make the site more successful.

At first, we didn’t know what to say. After all, we had designed the first version of the site almost five years ago now, and as everybody knows, Dragonfly Networks always gets the website exactly right the first time.

How could we possibly make it any better?

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Just kidding. Even if we had made the site perfect back then, well, the Internet changes, and nowadays people are looking at websites through much different devices than they used to, just for starters.

Let’s take a look at the header, from the original design:

Not bad, clearly. From a typographical standpoint, pretty nice, actually, reflecting a lot of the ideals held by Jenni in terms of readability and clarity, with a subdued color palette and softly highlighted buttons upon rollover.

However, one thing has changed over the last five years, and that’s the sheer quantity of information the site contains. Jenni and her staff have been diligently updating the site since its inception, and the number of posts (and categories) contained within the site has increased considerably.

So, let’s take a look at the new header, and see how we did:

Now, that’s what I call a header, (I can heap effusive praise on it here, because Jenni came up with the visual design concept) and it is clearly much more functional.

We added:

• Search capabilities
• Drop-down submenus
• Sign-in functionality
• A bright new color palette
• Gentle gradient backgrounds on the rollovers
• A lot more pages
• Cool new CSS “dotted” borders for that hip yet vintage look

In short, we made a massive improvement on the site’s navigability and search-friendliness without sacrificing any of the typographical purity or eye-appeal.

Additional Functionality

We also did a similar thing to the left-hand (category) navigation menu, giving a flyout effect to the menu when a parent category has child categories. Again, making the menu much more navigable and giving the sites visitors more ways to browse content.

Next, we added a Tag Cloud to the left sidebar. This ended up being really fun, although it did involve a bit of work as Jenni ended up going back through all her posts to tag them. (Now that she knows, though, she’s tagging new posts as she goes, which is pretty easy.)

Tag clouds are great because they show people a much more visually rich description of what kinds of topics the site contains. Larger words are topics that have been covered more frequently, while smaller words represent those topics that have only been referred to by one or two posts.

The Lunalux email newsletter

You’ll also notice the Lunalux email newsletter information in the sidebar, if you look carefully. Jenni has been sending out email newsletters to people who subscribe to her list, and it’s been a great way to remind her clients that Lunalux is available for custom stationery, wedding invitations, and more.

So Far, So Good

Still, we wondered, after adding drop-down menus and the tag cloud, what else might visitors enjoy?

Well, we know that Lunalux customers and clients are fascinated by letterpress printing. So, we decided to take a dip into one of Flickr’s photo pools and make a small section where photos would stream into the site as people add them to Flickr.

In other words, whenever someone posts a photo to Flickr and labels it “Letterpress”, it shows up on the Lunalux website, with a link back to the original photograph on Flickr. Pretty slick, right?

Of course, this does give up a little control over what appears in this section. We hope that most people who use Flickr’s letterpress pool don’t decide to play a prank on us and use this vulnerability to slip in pictures of Vanessa Hudgens or Zac Efron or what-have-you.

(Of course, even if they do, the photos will change again the next day, so… whatever!)

Random Links to Sites Lunalux Likes

Jenni has also been keeping a really long list of links to websites that she happens upon that meet one of these qualifications:

• letterpress sites
• typography sites
• design sites
• businesses next door to Lunalux
• curiosity shoppes
• things Jenni thinks are cute, or neat.

We decided a fun way to showcase some of those links would be to list a random handful out of the hundreds she has bookmarked, and make the links change every time the page is refreshed.

Subtle Changes to Content

We also made a variety of subtle changes to the way the site’s content is presented. So subtle, in fact, that we’re not going to do any side-by-side comparisons.

We made very few changes to this aspect of the site because we wanted Lunalux’s visitors to have an easy, trouble-free transition between the old site and the new, and wanted them to focus on the brand rather than any elaborate changes to the layout.

However, that being said, we did add a few things to the site’s center column that are worth mentioning:

• Context-sensitive “related posts” sections
• Better character spacing and line-height
• Careful attention to picture sizes & placement
• General focus on clarity and legibility

Context-Sensitive Sidebars!

Lastly, I wanted to mention that we also spent a great deal of time developing context-sensitive sidebars, specifically, the right sidebar content changes according to where the visitor has navigated to on the site.

So, for instance, visitors who click on a page located in the ‘Custom’ section of the site will see information related to custom products reflected in the sidebar.

It’s generally a pretty useful thing in terms of helping people discover more about the topics they’re interested in. Pretty sweet, hunh?

In Conclusion

This project was truly exciting and really represents the culmination of a relationship between Dragonfly Networks and Lunalux that has stood the test of time. Really, the relationship is quite important to us for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost, we wanted to emphasize the high-quality content Jenni has amassed over the last five years, and to lure visitors to the site by making it as visually attractive and easy to navigate as possible.

The project did take quite a while. Due to Jenni’s typographically-oriented nature, we ended up going back and forth, making a large number of minor revisions as the site was fleshed out, then incorporating some new ideas as the WordPress technologies we were using matured. Overall, I believe that the project took around three months from concept to launch.

Although that may seem like a long time in Internet years, it is actually not uncommon for sites that have as much content as Lunalux. And we’re finding that those sites who have diligent owners, who pay attention to the quality of their posts, and try to consistently bring fresh new content into their site, fare the best in terms of Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and obtaining high placement on the major search engines.

Jenni uses Google Analytics for her SEO purposes, and finds it enormously helpful in gauging how well her site is delivering the right information to the right audiences.

For more information about SEO, and what we’ve done to maximize our clients return on their investments, you may wish to read this article about our last major SEO consulting project.

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Mark Beihoffer
Chief Technology Officer
Dragonfly Networks