Lucis Trust
Overview
Live Site
www.lucistrust.orgClient Since
June 2014
The Lucis Trust is dedicated to the establishment of a new and better way of life for everyone in the world based on the fulfillment of the divine plan for humanity. Its educational activities promote recognition and practice of the spiritual principles and values upon which a stable and interdependent world society may be based.
The esoteric philosophy of its founder, Alice Bailey, informs its activities which are offered freely throughout the world in eight languages.
Services Provided
The Lucis Trust decided to work with Hop Studios because of our clean and simple design aesthetic, which resonated with the direction the Trust wanted to take with a website redesign – their first such redesign in many years.
When the Lucis Trust got in touch with Hop Studios, they wanted to refresh their outdated design and make the site easier to navigate, particularly for those new to the site but already familiar with esoteric philosophy. Lucis Trust staff in charge of updating the site wanted to make it easier to change the site’s architecture and to be able to take full advantage of the pamphlets, publications, video and recordings the organization had created over the years. Adding responsive support for phones and tablets was also a significant goal.
Language support was a special challenge. Each piece of content on the site had been translated into multiple languages, a great service for readers but something of a nightmare to maintain and update.
Actually, the word “multiple” came up a lot during this project:
- The site needed to accommodate multiple currencies in the store, where Lucis Trust sells its extensive range of books, e-books, audiobooks, and other materials.
- Multiple timezones were an important factor in presenting the Events Calendar. (It was a pretty significant factor is managing the project as well—with Lucis staff in three timezones and Hop in another, every meeting minute when everyone was present really had to count!)
- And multiple currencies as well as multiple payment gateways combined to make directing donations and purchases interesting: The site handles US dollars, British pounds and Euros, and shunts them to respective offices in New York, London and Geneva.
The Lucis Trust chose to work with Hop Studios because of our track-record of handling large, complex sites, which are such a challenge to design and create, but are even more challenging to redesign. Migrating the organization’s original site into the ExpressionEngine CMS from EZ Publish was no small feat.
Last, but far from least, Hop Studios worked extensively with Lucis Trust to redesign their logo. Logos are never easy—it’s always a tough job to capture the essence of an organization’s mission and goal in a single non-textual visual. Doing so for an inclusive esoteric spiritual organization with an international audience…. it was daunting but inspiring. Let’s just say we’re very proud of the result, and hope it serves Lucis Trust well for many years to come.
Testimonial
"We chose to work with Hop Studios in the redesign of our extensive and rather complex site because we believed that that they would be sensitive to the spirit of what we were trying to communicate. Other companies we approached put more emphasis on their vision of who they thought we were and who (in their opinion) we could become. Choosing to go with HOP was a good decision. The HOP team has proved to be good listeners, flexible and patient while also working well with deadlines and time constraints – often helping us to think through how we could best present ideas. It has been a very good working relationship. We have specific challenges of offering a multi-language site with different currencies and a range of programs and resources. HOP’s assistance and guidance has been invaluable."
Steve Nation