Our Daily Planet
The Challenge
Our Daily Planet is a daily environmental email newsletter that launched in early 2018 and had a dedicated, growing audience. But founders Monica and Miroslava wanted a bigger platform to spread the word about the newsletter and encourage people to subscribe. They’d done well promoting the newsletter through social media networks but needed a “home” for the newsletter where visitors could easily subscribe, learn about the publication, and browse past issues. They needed the site up and running within four to six weeks.
A clean, subscriber-focused home page
I worked with Our Daily Planet’s team to come up with a focused homepage dedicated to the primary task of adding subscribers. We also looked to answer the essential question of what the newsletter was about, and who should subscribe to it. I worked with them to pare down and condense their language to a short “elevator pitch” for would-be subscribers: “Sign up to stay on top of the stories that shape our environment and the people working to protect our planet.”
Our Daily Planet had a great existing logo, so I used that as the inspiration for the website color palette, drawing from its two primary colors to create a unified, consistent design throughout the site.
Explaining “who” and “why”
In my experience, the “About” section is one of the most important pages on any website. It’s always one of the most viewed pages because visitors invariably want to know what you’re about and who you are.
I worked with the team to make sure this answered both of those questions in a bit more detail, without going too long. I also wanted to make sure this included more imagery that fit the theme of the newsletter and conveyed its focus on clean air and water.
A welcoming way to connect
The team wanted to encourage readers to provide tips, feedback, and story ideas, so I worked to make it easy and inviting for visitors to send messages to Our Daily Planet. As always, I made sure the form worked easily on any size screen or device. Typically, more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so Flying Dog Creative always starts with small screens in mind.
Showing the newsletter
The Our Daily Planet team wanted to be able to show the latest issue and past editions of the newsletter on the website without having to spend a lot of time recreating them in WordPress. I set up a system that allowed them to import their MailChimp newsletters to the website and publish them within minutes.
I trained them on importing their newsletters to make sure the process was easy to manage, and now, it’s a quick, painless part of their publishing workflow.