How Lvl-7 helped save the Dodo Pad website from extinction
Lvl-7 has recently completed a major project for an online and wholesale retailer of stationery products, and we're extremely excited to share with you the result of all our efforts.
This Dodo's not dead.
The Dodo Pad Ltd produces and sells diaries, including the eponymous week-to-view annual diary, as well as calendars, journals, and other stationery products. It is a valued heritage brand with a fascinating history. Illustrator and author Sir John Verney first created the Dodo Pad in 1966, and a new edition has been published every year since (apart from a brief gap in 1973). Packed with delightful illustrations and a helpful organisational grid system, the Dodo Pad has amassed quite the loyal following of fans, or "dodopadlers", across the globe who use the diary to organise every minute detail of their family, work and academic life. The character Lord Dodo, Verney’s fictional alter-ego and “author” of each diary, personifies the brand’s quirky sense of humour that dodopadlers find so endearing.
When new owners acquired the business, they wanted to create a new site to usher the Dodo Pad into a new era, one that would help the brand reach its full potential and compete in the modern eCommerce environment. That’s where we came in.
The brief.
Dodo Pad Ltd tasked Lvl-7 with developing an entirely new website that would deliver a seamless modern user experience (UX) while retaining all of Sir John Verney’s unique charm that imbued the old website. We envisioned a final website that would feel familiar to the myriad of Dodo fans but also engage new customers with a revamped design complete with all the modern features that improve SEO value and increase conversions.
The project was a sizeable undertaking because it involved replatforming the site from its original restrictive platform that was no longer supported, improving the site infrastructure and delivering a responsive UX that would look great on all devices.
Here's a little insight into how we did it.
Managing a cherished business.
The Dodo Pad was lovingly run by its previous owner for 25 years before being transferred to its current new ownership. Developing the digital assets of such a beloved brand required excellent stakeholder management – and that's precisely what Lvl-7 offers. Our team worked closely with both the previous and new owners so that we fully understood their chosen direction for the brand and their reasons for the redesign. We could then ensure the final digital product met all their requirements and served above and beyond its purpose.
We maintained nothing short of impeccable communication with our clients. We always listened to their desired direction for the brand every single step of the way, offering customised project management with round-the-clock 24-hour support from start to finish so that we could help them realise their ambitions. Not only did we arrange weekly meetings via video call throughout the entire project to discuss and receive feedback, but we also used WhatsApp messaging to respond to any queries instantly at any time during the week. By setting up continuous communications between parties, we ensured that our client and all the members of the Lvl-7 team stayed well-informed and up-to-date on every creative decision.
Building a valued site.
We replatformed the site from its old CMS, WordPress, to Shopify, which gave us more freedom to build the eCommerce website that matched our client's and our vision. Conveying the site from one CMS to another involved migrating the mailing list and product information to Shopify, which required very meticulous work in the backend. Because we wanted to deliver a unique digital experience, the project called for bespoke development within Shopify to ensure we could achieve all the necessary functionality. We built the site adhering to SEO best practices, ensuring the on-page elements were fully optimised so that each page would provide value to users. We also implemented a robust off-site strategy. Our SEO marketing director successfully set up over 14,000 redirects of inbound URLs so that we wouldn't lose any of the existing SEO value of the original site or erase any of the Dodo Pad's digital footprint.
As well as making it safe and secure for customers to place orders online, Shopify has also enabled us to cater to customers who prefer to place orders over the phone, providing us with the functionality to fulfil phone orders in the backend efficiently. We also needed to link the website with the warehouse, which we did using a warehouse integration solution. The warehouse management software allows us to access, at any time, a complete overview of the Dodo Pad inventory, which updates every time a customer places an order on the site.
Then there was also the challenging task of carefully transferring all of the existing customer data to the new site, which we did by running manual queries in several online and offline databases to create a master transfer document.
Successfully set up over 14,000 redirects of inbound URLs
Redesigning the Dodo.
One of the most pressing tasks on our agenda was to redesign the look of the old website to reflect the Dodo Pad's transition into a new era. We looked at all the facets of the diary’s appeal: the Dodo’s style of dry, witty humour; the colourful, amusing artwork; and its easy-to-use, practical layout. The new design had to encapsulate all these factors to feel like the perfect visual representation of the diary, giving visitors a taste of the Dodo spirit as they browsed the website.
It made sense, of course, to take visual inspiration from the diary itself. The front cover of the upcoming 2022 Dodo Pad Diary breaks away from the template of the older Dodo Pad covers; it features numerous hand-drawn picture frames, arranged against a white background, that contain vivid, contrasting colours and sketches of Dodos in various guises. This cover informed our designer’s colour choices throughout the website, enabling them to establish a consistent visual identity for the brand.
For the new home page, the designer strove for a simplified, clean look. Like the 2022 diary’s front cover, the site has a white background, with lively splashes of colour used to draw the visitor’s eye to essential features such as the hero banner and attention-grabbing CTAs. The hero images allow the flagship products – the Dodo Pad diary and the Acad-Pad – to take centre stage in all their glory and provide users with easy access to the main product pages. When scrolling down, visitors can find all the crucial information they need compartmentalised into clear sections. To accommodate all web users, we have designed the homepage, along with all other pages on the site, to be responsive so that their display looks fantastic on desktop, mobile or any size screen
Creating a ‘dodelightful’ UX.
Lord Dodo’s inventive illustrations are what define the Dodo Pad and help set it apart from other week-to-view diaries on the market, so we felt it was imperative for these distinctive doodles to adorn the home page. To bring the diary’s vibrant drawings to life on the site, we have added a selection of monthly 'On this Day' facts (interesting and unconventional historical facts that are another staple of the eccentric Dodo style) with accompanying drawings from the diary. Many sketches are also now present around the products in the hero images to infuse the hero banner with character. Taking another cue from the 2022 edition, we have added hand-drawn frames around each category on the main shop page. Another crucial new feature that brings the diary’s much-loved content into the spotlight is the animated preview on the home page, which provides an easy and convenient way for users to sample the Dodo Pad on the home page before they buy.
As part of the redesign, our design team has also created a tidier navigation menu to facilitate the customer’s shopping experience. To accomplish this, we organised all the pages into a site taxonomy, in which all the product pages were neatly sorted into an appropriate product category. Having the simple site taxonomy helped us easily visualise the whole site and see where we could streamline the content by consolidating several pages of the old site into one. The result is a top-level navigation bar that is clean and uncrowded. The revised site architecture has the storefront divided into clear sections to make browsing and locating products an enjoyable experience. Adopting a simplified page hierarchy has also enabled us to implement an easy-to-understand URL structure, user-friendly breadcrumbs at the top of each product page, and a sound internal linking structure between the product and category pages, all of which are essential for any effective SEO strategy and vastly improve UX.
Reshaping the content.
The signature Lord Dodo wit was present in the existing copy of the old site. However, it had not been refreshed for quite a few years. Therefore, we decided it would be best, for the sake of the site’s SEO value, to undertake a complete rewrite of the copy, starting all the pages from scratch. Our copywriter had the challenge of capturing the distinct voice the Dodo Pad is known for, emulating all its quirks and idiosyncrasies, while ensuring every page still served its purpose to consumers as an informative product description that would fit into the new site's streamlined architecture. They spent a lot of time looking through the old website and many previous editions of the diaries, immersing themselves in the creative world of Lord Dodo so that they could produce stylistically similar content, filled with many wry quips and plenty of pun-derful plays on words.
We used this same tone of voice when writing the Google Ads campaign, which we set up to help gain a further flow of traffic to the site. The campaign links to each of the new categories on the site and is running alongside a Google shopping campaign, the results of which we are already seeing, as the Dodo Pad is showing up in the organic shopping listings.
You can rely on us.
Because of the pandemic, the entire Lvl-7 team completed all of this fantastic work on the Dodo Pad remotely. We had the infrastructure in place to ensure that the current situation did not impede our progress in any way, and we delivered the project, fitted to the client's exact specification, on time, comfortably meeting the launch deadline without any delays. At Lvl-7, we will always go beyond the call of duty to create top-quality work within the timeframe specified by the client.
Although on this project our communications strategy had to be devised and adapted around the current global situation, it of course won’t always be this way. Now that the country appears to be firmly on the road out of lockdown and the restrictions are beginning to ebb away, we will have the freedom and flexibility to do even more for our clients in the future and meet their every need. We can’t wait to conduct face-to-face meetings and workshops with clients to get to the heart of their brand and discover the best route to unlocking its full potential.
The staff at Dodo Pad are ecstatic with the work we have done, and we are proud to have worked with such an exceptional brand in a pivotal moment of its history. You can see for yourself all the hard work we’ve done by visiting the new Dodo Pad website here.
We love creating innovative digital products for a whole range of clients from various industries, so if you would like to reinvent your digital presence, no matter what market you're in, get in touch with Lvl-7 today.