Our Work

Services Provided

Latino Verde is a Squarespace website that goes far beyond what Squarespace usually does “out of the box.” We worked with Molly Multedo, Latino Verde’s director, to focus in on both small and large areas of improvement. We looked at everything—social media sharing tags, design and layout, audience needs, and the organization’s future plans.

Along the way, we did a lot of small housekeeping stuff, like making sure the site was set up with SSL, indexed properly by Google, has an XML sitemap, has a favicon, and plays nicely with social media websites.

We also spent time assessing the site’s home and story pages to make recommendations to improve both the layout and design, and to be sure the site was meeting the needs of visitors. Specifically, we:

• Set up a newsletter subscribe box on every page
• Installed multi-language support using the third-party service Weglot, so that the site content can be read in English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish
• Reorganized the site’s content into verticals for different story types
• Set up the site’s new podcast, Latino Verde Nuestras Historias
• Spiffed up the site design

Our favorite project for this website, however, was creating the (very cool, if we do say so ourselves) story map (scroll down the home page) that shows pins for every story and organization covered by Latino Verde on a Google Map. We started by building a Google Sheet with information about every story, including latitude and longitude coordinates. We then utilized the Google Data API to translate the spreadsheet data into a JSON feed. After writing some fancy Javascript that flows the JSON data into the Google Maps API, a story map was born! This is an especially useful tool for visitors who want to find stories, experts, and organizations in a geographic area quickly and easily.

This project hit so many of Hop Studios’ design and development sweet spots, and we’re grateful to Latino Verde for the opportunity to contribute to such a meaningful purpose.