Blitz Paintball
Blitz Paintball is a paintball center located in Dacono, Colorado. It is one of the top 5 facitilities in the United States and has a large local following of paintball players. People from all around the United States fly into Colorado just to play at this facility and it is meticulously maintained to make sure the quality of the surface is outstanding for all players from novice to expert. The paintball facility also includes an airsoft field as well.
01. Approach
This project had a lot of latitude due to the age of the previous site and lack of functionality. Issac the owner wanted to make sure that the site was more modern and also worked properly on mobile devices as the old site was not mobile optimized. A vast majority of the clientelle is novice and young people who want to have fun. Therefore we made a conscious effort to show how much fun paintball can be and to avoid focusing on the expert players. We wanted to make sure that mom's were comfortable leaving their kids to have fun without worry and we wanted it to portray an ultra-safe environment for all ages and abilities. The last areas we wanted to improve were bachelor parties and team building activities because these large parties could rent the facility at diffeent times of the year.
02. Design
The color scheme started with black but added the color splatters of actual paintballs. We did a search and found exploding paintball images online and did a color match with pink, blue, yellow and orange for authenticity. After looking at a variety of different sites to get an idea of fonts we decided that the Archivo family was both strong and readable so we used Archivo Bold for headlines and Archivo narrow for the body. Animations were created on scroll down to draw attention to different elements of the website without being overly distracting. The site already ranked very well for paintball in the area. Therefore, we focused on relevant keywords in the team building and bachelor party segments optimized these pages for search. This included schema.org and JSON-LD markup along with HTML5 to guide search engines.
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Archivo narrow
03. Technology
The Blitz Paintball project is a totally responsive design based on CSS Grid Layout with a Flexbox fallback. That means the project is not reliant on an outside library of code or javascript to be fully responsive. The starting point was HTML5 Boilerplate to make sure the project was utilizing current best practices and most browser based styling was reset using Normalize.css. We don't utilize templates so all coding was done by hand using the Brackets code editor. The Blitz team is also able to add blog articles, maintain the verbiage and images on the site by utlizing Perch as the content management system. Every page in the project was validated and confirmed to be W3C compliant, with the exception of lazy loaded images and script enhancements that make the site load faster. All css files are modular in nature so Gulp was used to combine and condense all CSS files in the final project build in order to make the page load speed better. The final page load speed averages less than 1.8 seconds per page due and is helped by utilizing the free version of Cloudflare as a CDN and site optimization. CSS and javascript animation was created by using the following libraries Animate.css, Hover.css, & T-Scroll. Other code and libraries used include Modernizr, jQuery, Akismet, Lazyload.js and Google Analytics. Software utilized to create this project included Brackets, Photoshop, Perch CMS, VectorMagic.com and CompressPNG.com.
The coding and software skills used by Colorado SEO Design to make this project take off included:
- Photoshop
- PHP
- HTML5
- CSS3
- Javascript
- JSON
- Schema.org markup
