Blue Parrot
Blue Parrot Painting is a local painting company based in Boulder Colorado. They do interior, exterior and decorative painting projects in northern Colorado. They have been painting across the front range for over 25 years for both commercial and residential projects. Some of the more well known customers include painting Joe Cocker's mansion as well as painting the plants for Coors brewing company in Golden. They provide the highest quality work and only employ classically trained painters that have the most exacting standards.
01. Approach
This project had some specific requirements and the owners wanted to be more involved in the website layout and color choices. The owner Sheree had previously published the old website with a website builder which of course limited the design potential and search engine optimization of the site. The old website did not show the high quality work that they provided so it was imperative that we included a gallery that could show the work that they do. We wanted to make sure potential clients understood that they were working with a highly skilled classically trained painting company, so any indication that they were "cheap" needed to leave the building and in a hurry. Due to the COVID pandemic it was important the potential customers could provide images for contactless bidding of projects.
02. Design
The company already had a logo so we wanted to use this logo to create the color palette. The owners loved black as it denotes luxury so it was important that we used black in different areas of the site. However, we didn't want the site to be too "dark" so to brighten it up we also used a pastelle orange and blue color to accent the black. We decided that we wanted an elegant feel on the website so we went with "Lara" for headlines and "Lato" for the body of the text. Animations were created on scroll to draw attention to different elements of the website without being over bearing. The old site had limited ranking appeal because it was built with a website builder. So the new site was optimized with markup from schema.org and JSON-LD markup along with HTML5 to guide search engines.
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03. Technology
The Blue Parrot Painting 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 Blue Parrot 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 1.6 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, RealFaviconGenerator.net 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
