Texas Library Association
The Texas Library Association has been the cornerstone of library advocacy in Texas since 1902, making it the largest state library association in the country. With more than 6,000 members spanning public, academic, school, and special libraries, TLA is the unified voice for library excellence across the Lone Star State.
TLA has spent over a century building something worth protecting: a thriving community of library professionals united by a shared belief that access to information changes lives. Their membership grew, their brand matured, and their annual conference became the state's premier gathering for library professionals. Their digital presence needed to reflect that momentum, with a structure flexible enough to grow right alongside them. TLA had outgrown the existing page templates, and their evolving brand needed more room than their current digital home could offer.
It wasn't TLA's first rodeo with Monkee-Boy, so when it came time to write the next chapter, the call was an easy one to make.
Monkee-Boy turns the page.
Priority Goals
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Intuitive Navigation - A review of existing content, analytics, and user journeys drove a streamlined structure that helps TLA's 6,000+ members find what they need without the runaround.
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A Flexible, Future-Ready Theme - The new WordPress theme evolves the brand, expands content layout options, and improves Core Web Vitals performance, giving the TLA team room to grow without hitting a wall.
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Accessibility for Every Texan - Guidance, recommendations, and technical protections ensure the site meets WCAG AA compliance standards, so every member can access TLA's resources regardless of ability.
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One Cohesive Conference Experience - Extending the new theme and toolset to the annual conference site created a connected, intuitive experience across both properties that reflects the quality of TLA's brand.
Challenges
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Honoring the Old While Building the New - The redesign had to accommodate existing content and legacy design elements while still feeling fresh, a careful balancing act that sits outside our usual process.
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A Brand That Bends Without Breaking - Evolving TLA's brand meant finding a visual through-line that felt cohesive across their wide range of events, publications, and collateral, each with its own personality.
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Familiar Yet Distinct - The conference site needed to feel like a natural extension of txla.org while standing on its own, with a distinct identity tailored to conference-goers.
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Subdomain Migration & Redirect Strategy - Moving conference content to a subdomain required a thoughtful redirect strategy to preserve existing URLs, protect TLA's search presence, and keep members from hitting dead ends.
Read the Room, Then Build It
Good design starts with good research. Before a single pixel was placed, the Monkee-Boy team dug into existing analytics, heat map observations, and user personas to understand how TLA's members were actually using the site. What they found shaped everything that followed.
Those insights informed a CMS architecture built around flexibility from the ground up. Custom page builder elements give TLA's content managers real creative control, so new pages can be built, structured, and styled without calling in reinforcements. The system is designed to grow alongside TLA as their content needs evolve.
A Design Worth Dog-Earing
TLA's existing collateral already had something going for it: personality. Warm, playful, and engaging, the kind of visual language that makes a community feel like a community. The challenge was channeling that energy into a website that could hold it all together.
The design pulls from those fun, welcoming elements and expands them into a full system that feels cohesive without being rigid. Bold color, expressive graphic elements, and a flexible layout accommodate TLA's wide range of events, publications, and campaigns, creating an experience that feels unmistakably TLA.
Same Book, New Chapter
A full redesign doesn't always mean starting from a blank page. For TLA, the move to a new theme had to happen without pulling the rug out from under the content and design elements already familiar to their members.
The new theme and page builder system were built to coexist with TLA's existing content and legacy elements, allowing both to live side by side as the team works through the transition at their own pace. New content gets the full benefit of the updated design system. Existing content holds its own without feeling out of place.
Annual Conference on the Front Shelf
The TLA Annual Conference draws thousands of attendees from across the state for sessions, workshops, and an exhibit hall packed with the latest in library resources and technology. It deserved more than a footnote in the navigation.
Access to the conference site is prominent and unmissable from the main TLA navigation. And while the conference site shares the same design foundation as txla.org, it has its own identity: a distinct color palette, curated graphic assets, and a structure tailored for conference-goers. Familiar enough to feel like home. Different enough to feel like an event.
Always on the Same Page
Keeping up with TLA means keeping up with a full calendar of webinars, district meetings, professional development sessions, and more. The new events calendar makes that easy.
Members can browse upcoming events from any device with a clean, responsive layout. And the calendar doesn't just live in one place. Custom event feeds can be pulled into other pages across the site, surfacing relevant upcoming events wherever members are most likely to discover them.
The Page Keeps Turning
Launching the new TLA site was a milestone, not the final page. Monkee-Boy continues to work alongside TLA as a long-term digital partner, keeping the experience secure, stable, and ready for whatever the next chapter brings.
Premium Hosting & Essential Security
TLA's digital presence serves thousands of members across the state, and keeping it up and running isn't optional. Monkee-Boy provides premium hosting, security, and ongoing backups through an intelligent infrastructure built to keep TLA's community connected and protected.
Keeping the Catalog Current
A website is only as strong as the software it runs on. Monkee-Boy handles monthly updates to WordPress core, themes, and plugins, along with uptime monitoring and ongoing audits to identify and recommend plugin improvements. When issues surface, dedicated time is built in to address them, so the TLA team can stay focused on their members while the site stays in good shape behind the scenes.