If you follow my blog regularly, you know that we've been hard at work on a yoga studio software that helps independent yoga studios manage their students, class attendances, schedules, and all the other things someone needs to run a yoga studio.

From an engineering standpoint, we've done some really awesome things, from allowing instructors to find subs via text messaging, to deeply integrating with Stripe so that our customers can start taking credit cards in minutes.

But as we know, engineering is only half the battle.

And being a small Rails shop one of the things I've come to terms with is that while we've gotten quite good at designing page layouts, application flows, overall user experience, and making important decisions about what to put in and what to leave out of a product, we're not as good at bringing in what I'd call 'the shine' to a complex web application or it's marketing pages.

So, I enlisted the help of Rand Media Group, a small marketing and design company in Chicago. Disclaimer: they're run by my buddy Ryan Evans, and we happen to inhabit the same co-working space as well. Though, that should take nothing away from my praise.

Visually, the results are obvious. Our application was taken to the next level in that it had a much more polished feel, and the landing page did a great job not only of engaging site visitors, but also of telling the story of how we built this product after my wife opened her yoga studio.

But none of that would matter if our signups weren't improving. Luckily, they're even better than I had hoped for. We're converting new visitors into trial users at 4 times the rate we were previously, and they're far more engaged on the site when they do visit, visiting twice as many pages.

Check out the before and after below, and our site at www.tulasoftware.com. And if you're a startup in need of some design help, I can't recommend Rand Media Group enough.

Before and After