Your True Nature - WebPlanDesign

Your True Nature is a industry leader for postcards, magnets, mugs, and more relating to the enviornment, and they wanted a site that reflects that. They contracted out to a third party company, but felt they wanted more for their site and the user experience. They contacted us to work on animating the home page, working on their SEO, helping with customer retention, creating custom pages, and adding exciting new features to their shopify based store. We felt this would be a perfect job for us to work on and worked with them to create a user experience that helps others get a better feel of nature, learn about the origins of the company, help teachers interact with students, and sell nature related merchandise.

www.yourtruenature.com

Setting The Ground Work

To start we worked with Your True Nature to move their company to a more reliable and faster hosting provider. This step cut down their hosting costs and helped them consolidate all the files in a much more easy to use location. Next we went through all their current pages, and Shopify pages and implemented SEO measures. This ranged from changing how images load on pages, to setting up proper meta tags, to tweaking mobile pages for load times. Resulting in faster loading times and substantially increased google SEO scores.

Animating The Story

While the site’s homepage was looking good, they wanted great, and with that came a more living webpage. We placed animated gifs throughout the home page, and set them up in a way that would run on most any browser. The animated images made the site come alive as you continued to scroll. At first you only had a butter fly the would flap its wings 3 times total, then an owl that would blink slowly, followed by a hummingbird that would constantly flap it’s wings, and finally a squirrel moving its tail. The goal of this was to make the main homepage feel more like a living forest than just an image.

Informing The Audience

So now that visitors have a great introduction to the company they need an in depth way to know who “You True Nature” is. This is where we created custom pages for the business. We first started with a ‘meeting the founders’ page, allowing users to see a quick summary of events that ultimately lead to the creation of Your True Nature. Inside the page users had the ability to click on each step of the companies journey and have a colorful interactive popup detailing each step. Other key pages created are a tree planting page guide, activities to help the planet, and a custom themed blog page to increase SEO. These pages gave a deeper understanding of just who the company was, their missions, and why you should trust doing business with them.

Store Navigation

The foundation of any great business is the storefront. It gives visitors the first impression of quality, and determines if they want to trust a business with their money. The goal of the web stores rework was to create fluid navigation for users. To start we created a custom script the changes the left side image every month, this takes users to pages about plants and animals that relate to that month. Next a simple search bar was added, allowing users after a specific product to easily find it, but also popular categories and product types were added below it too.

Making Members Feel Special

A custom membership area and blog sections were added to help new and current members interact more easily with the site. We changed the product pages and categories to allow users to select the amount of the of products they are after on every page, with related products located on the bottom of the page. The Shopify Storefront experience gave new and current users a professional yet comfortable experience when using the site.

It’s All About Retention

Customers now are visiting the site, and enjoy learning about the company, but we need to keep new and old customers coming back. This is where our customer retention plan goes into effect. To start members are enticed to create a free account to gain access to teaching tools, yoga guides, and other free perks by joining. Next a user is emailed, congratulating them on joining, and enticing them with free tree planting after their first purchase. After a user purchases from the site, a custom coded mailchimp app connects with their Shopify payment system auto opting members to the mailing list (which they can easily opt out of if desired). This mailing list periodically informs them of deals going on, new events, new products, and helps connect them to social media accounts improving the overall customer retention.

Final Thoughts

The project started out rough due to an older content management platform, but after a few months the project came together beautifully. My favorite part would be “meet the founders” section. The set up boxes for Ilan’s journey, and how you can click on them for an interactive popup, quickly became of my favorite pieces of work ever.
Nicholas Teagarden – CEO – Lead Developer

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