Your guide to the best dining experiences in Boston.
Your belly's new best friend.
The client.
The Food Lens (TFL) is a startup restaurant guide and content powerhouse, focused on helping readers find the best places to eat in Boston. The hottest restaurants, coolest bars, and most popular chefs come to life on a website packed with mouth-watering images and appetite-inducing videos. The Food Lens keeps content fresh and new, making the site a destination that foodies return to time and time again.
The challenge.
In the age of Instagram, there’s no shortage of high-quality content for foodies. To stand above the crowd, The Food Lens needed not just a visually stunning, immersive website, but an intuitive, easy-to-use user experience that keeps folks coming back for seconds. Digital Impulse was brought on to build the company’s web presence from the ground up, and differentiate The Food Lens from a smorgasbord of competitors vying for media supremacy in Boston’s thriving food scene.
Eat. Drink. Explore.
Call it digital comfort food. To bring people to the table, we needed to whip up a website that offered content like mom used to make — fresh, fun, and super personalized. The Digital Impulse team designed a website for The Food Lens that serves up generous helpings of delicious digital content, curated in real-time by a sophisticated search algorithm cooked up by our own developers.
In search of love (and food).
People coming to The Food Lens are often seeking a specific restaurant, location, or type of food, so we went all in designing and developing a user interface and experience driven by powerful search functionality. Rather than rely on default WordPress site search, we developed a beautiful custom hierarchical live search algorithm which finds relevant results first, and gives the content administrators the ability to boost pages for specific terms. Try typing “taco” or “Fenway”!
Elegance - from French pastries to greasy slices.
To highlight The Food Lens’ beautiful photography, we designed a familiar digital-editorial content layout with casual charm. New fonts — a traditional serif and more progressive sans serif — were hand-picked to reflect the brand and featured cuisine’s unique mix of Old World elegance and modern flair.
We don’t want our clients forced to rely on expensive, outside developers for routine content updates. So we prioritized flexibility. On the backend, our development team implemented a custom WordPress implementation that is as simple as it is powerful, allowing multiple user types to publish content fast and on-the-fly.
“The energy around this project was contagious - it was too much fun creating new layouts and components for the UI.”
Travis Pease
VP of Design
Dinner is served.
With web design and development complete, The Digital Impulse team executed a roll-out strategy leveraging targeted Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter content, as well as an email campaign to engage early signups and local food influencers. We combined vibrant, food-focused photography and email copy to drive high open and click rates. We also partnered with The Food Lens’ PR team to build segmented email lists for future campaigns so we can keep bringing the best dining experiences to the masses.
