Colorado Green Plumbing
Colorado Green Plumbing has been in business since 1980, setting the standard for local plumbers in Boulder and Weld County Colorado. What differentiates this family owned business is they are master plumbers and HVAC technicians. They don't have "green" employees and they only send out highly trained professionals to your job. Second generation owner Paul Lingenfelter has built a reputation of honesty, integrity and the highest quality work. It was important that we built a site that would reflect the same high standards that they provide to their customers.
01. Approach
This project didn't have any major time rush or soul crushing must have requirements. We were essentially given a brush and allowed to paint. During a couple of conversations with Paul it was clear that we needed differentiate the company based on longevity, the fact that they are masters of their craft and they are straightforward with all projects and pricing. Building trust quickly and showing why we are the best option with visitors was imperative because there are many plumbers in the area that can be used to do a job.
02. Design
The logo was already done, so in order to keep the branding similar we utilized the main colors of the logo as the two starter colors. Then we used complimentary lighter shades of the main colors for background filler colors to differentiate one section from another. The font choices were "Caslon Pro" a serif font for paragraphs and "Myriad Pro" a sans-serif font for headings. Both fonts are very readable and work well together as a pairing of serif with sans serif font.
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Caslon Pro
Myriad Pro
03. Technology
This project was a fully custom coded, non-templated, responsive layout based on CSS Grid with a Flexbox fallback for older browsers. Therefore, this project is not reliant on outside libraries or Javascript to be fully responsive. As per usual the starting point was HTML5 Boilerplate and Normalize.css, to follow current best practices and reset default browser styling. The Colorado Green Plumbing team will be able to maintain the verbiage, add articles and change images on the site by utlizing Perch as the content management system. Every page in the project was tested and confirmed to be W3C compliant. All css and other element files are modular in nature, so to speed up loading Gulp was used to combine and condense all CSS files. The slowest loading web page according to GTMetrix.com was approximately 1.8 seconds with most pages average loading times being less than 1.5 seconds. Also, to increase speed through caching and to meet Google SSL requirements we utilize Cloudflare. CSS and javascript animation were created by using the following libraries: Animate.css; Hover.css; & T-Scroll. Other code and libraries used include Modernizr, jQuery, Flexslider, Easy Responsive Tabs, Google Analytics. Software utilized to create this project included Brackets, Photoshop, Perch CMS, Akismet, VectorMagic.com and CompressPNG.com.
The coding skills used to make this project fly included:
- PHP
- HTML5
- CSS3
- Javascript
- JSON
