Hey y’all!
Last Tuesday we (Louise Fili Ltd) launched Montecatini Pro. To help promote the font and better showcase all of its features, we built a mini-site. If your browser supports variable fonts, then you can play with the width and weight axes in the header.
You can check it out here:
https://www.louisefili.com/montecatini-pro
I don't really want this to just be a “look at us!” post, so I wanted to ask if you all think mini-sites are beneficial to sales? Also, do you read mini-sites (more specifically historical/technical sections)?
Montecatini's biggest selling factor is probably its ligatures, and as many of you know, MyFonts new family pages aren't very user-friendly. Well, Montecatini's ligatures are built as contextual alternates, and unfortunately MyFonts doesn't have those turned on by default at the moment (nor can you activate them). So we were extremely glad that we built the mini-site to help better showcase them and also give customers the opportunity to test them.
I don't have too many stats I can share, but I will say that the mini-site has attracted an ~800% increase in web traffic to our website, and it has sold well over the past couple of days. We made it to #3 on MyFonts, just behind ol' Monotype so I'll call that a success so far.
Design credits:
Montecatini was designed by Louise Fili Ltd. Original design by Louise Fili and Nick Misani. Expanded design by Louise Fili and Andy Anzollitto. Additional assistance from Schriftlabor.
Comments
As Mark noted, most mini-sites exist under their own domain, however, I don't think thats a sole determining factor. In our case, we chose to keep the Montecatini Pro site nested under louisefili.com, but it contains none of the styling or functionality from our primary site.
For us, it's the difference between these two pages:
https://www.louisefili.com/montecatini (a standard web page)
https://www.louisefili.com/montecatini-pro (the mini-site)
To answer your question, I didn't solve it! (Or I should say, I didn't try to.) Granted, you can still tap around on mobile to change the weight/width, but the general effect is definitely lost.
75-85% of our web traffic is on desktop, and we treated it as more of an easter egg than a selling feature considering not all browsers will support its functionality.