In September of 2009 we were approached by the Louisiana Renaissance Festival to redesign their current website. The current site was outdated and running on a content management system that was no longer supported. Most of all the site simply was not representing the richness and scale of the Renaissance Festival that is open each Fall in near Hammond Louisiana. The site needed to showcase the shows and entertainment at the festival for an audience all around Louisiana and Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

We started out organizing some of the content and restructuring some of the sections of the site. We considered several design styles, from a very rich textured layout to a very clean white design reminiscent of a newspaper. The design we chose in the end took elements from both, maintaining a very clean layout and organization but incorporating some textured elements that represent the period. With wide vivid images and jQuery animation to rotate images on the homepage the design much better represents the Renaissance Festival and all that it offers.

Visit the site at http://www.larf.net

But what is most important is not just how improved the site looks, but the results that we’ve already seen. Besides tons of positive feedback from the site’s visitors, the analytics show that the new design is pulling visitors in more and keeping them on the site longer. Just two weeks after the site launched the Bounce Rate dropped to 29% from 39% two weeks prior on the old design. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who visited the site and then immediately left without browsing anything else. Kind of a “bail out percentage”.  Also the average time spent on the site went from 3:12 to 4:42 seconds showing that visitors to the site are staying on the site for more time. And while visiting the site they viewed an average of 5.01 pages per visit on the new site we designed versus 3.24 pages per visit before. As you can see, across the board the site’s performance is improved.