Underlined

Underlined needed a website as vibrant as its audience. Books bring visitors to the website but Underlined wanted to create an engaging and welcome community for “Book Nerds” and writers to unite and stay awhile. With a website that has an extensive inventory, traffic, and an online store, site speed and user-friendliness on the frontend and backend topped must-haves for this project.

Harry Potter had spells for unlocking doors, making water out of air, fixing glasses, and healing broken bones.

Redesigning a website? Not so much.

Underlined, an online community for young adult bibliophiles and aspiring writers, craved a website that was more of a real-time book club. With so many book titles and authors, they needed a way to easily add and organize them, while also improving site speed.

The Brandtenders at Lounge Lizard Worldwide turned that website fantasy into a thriller!

Brandtenders built a custom WordPress plugin designed to connect to Underline’s custom API created by Penguin Random House. That provides leverage for dynamic pages to automatically update books as they come in and organize them by author, series, and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs).

Updating books is now just as easy as discovering books.

The easy-to-navigate experience for consumers is a Book Nerd cultural experience. Finding books isn’t really just about finding books.

It’s about engaging in writing discussions, posting unique content, learning about events, shopping, and keeping up with book news.

The website design was crafted for young adults with elements and master guidelines from Penguin Random House.

By upgrading website speed, automating inventory, adding a branded  Shopify store, and creating a true community, the Brandtenders at Lounge Lizard finished its chapter with only one cliffhanger: How many more young adults will get excited about reading now that they have their own space?

“Lounge Lizard is amazing! We can’t recommend them highly enough,” says an executive at Penguin Random House. “From initial project scoping through to development and delivery, these folks know web development and branding. They solve problems, period. Privileged to be working with them.”