Our Work

Linea

Overview

Live Site
linea-inc.com
Client Since
July 2019

Linea Inc. is a high-end modern furniture store in Los Angeles, carrying contemporary European brands including Ligne Roset, Fiam Italia, Driade, Baleri Italia, LaCividina, Woodnotes, Serralunga and more.

We began working with Linea in July 2019, with the goals of upgrading their content management system, and updating the site to be responsive and mobile-friendly.

Services Provided

Everyone at Hop Studios has picked out a favorite piece of Linea furniture to lust after. Choosing was hard! Linea carries so many unusual and exciting pieces. It was very fun to work on a site with such great imagery and content, and to really focus on small user interface improvements as well as the big picture.

Our first big push for Linea was upgrading the ExpressionEngine content management system to the latest version. As with all our upgrades, we do a thorough upgrade assessment before starting work to identify the many potential elements that can be necessary for a full upgrade—updating PHP and MySQL on the server, identifying additional disk space requirements, and pinpointing which ExpressionEngine add-ons also need updating or replacing. We brought the CMS up to date from version 2.5, a big enough shift that we also got to introduce the Linea team to some new dashboard functionality and field types.

After upgrading, we turned the focus to making an already very attractive site a little more useful by making the site responsive and mobile-friendly. A responsive site changes width as the viewport/browser window changes size, making the site more functional for monitors of different sizes. We also reworked the design and code to provide a truly mobile-friendly version of the site so that visitors using phones and tablets have a more attractive and useful browsing experience.

We also got to do some small but very satisfying improvements that really added polish to the site:

  • Linea was an early adopter of a technology called Cufón, one of the first methods for using a non-standard font on the web that wasn’t just creating images with text in them. It was a great solution, but was discontinued in 2017 due to the rise of webfonts. This update sharpened up the display of the fonts, and allowed us to convert graphic form buttons and other elements to be entirely handled by CSS.
  • We implemented waterfall/infinite scrolling on furniture category pages that were previously browsable only by clicking through a series of pages.
  • We converted some PNG icons to SVG. SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, look sharper and cleaner than most image formats, and can easily be scaled. It’s a small improvement, but one we think will give the site more longevity and flexibility over the next few years.
  • This one is for the geeks: We switched over to using ExpressionEngine layout templates instead of header/footer embeds. No one will ever notice this improvement when viewing the site, but it means the site code is faster and easier to update.
  • We installed the Hop Edit This add-on, to allow Linea editors to start making edits and changes directly from the public-facing side of their site.
  • And, as always, we coded efficiency and accuracy improvements as we worked through the site’s code and templates.

 

Testimonial


"It was our first time working with Hop Studios. We were in need of an upgrade for our Express Engine. They upgraded our EE from 2.5 to the most recent EE (5.3). The team handled our project very professionally and worked within the given timeframe. We would like to give a special thank you to Chris and Joshua for being very punctual throughout our project. We strongly recommend Hop Studios and we look forward to continue working with them."

Sandra Bermudez, Digital Marketing Manager

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