Colorado Proud
Colorado Proud Heating and Cooling is a locally owned, fully licensed and insured HVAC contractor that specializes in Furnace and AC Repair. As a local family owned and operated business, they are proud to treat their customers like family. One of the things that makes them different is they are up front and honest with their pricing and they promise to offer a variety of money-saving solutions. They strive to exceed expectations by ensuring that each customer feels like a member of their family.
01. Approach
This project had a wide open canvas to start with as there was no logo or color choices made. The owners Lachelle and Hans had previously published an old website with GoDaddy's website builder which of course limited the design potential and search engine optimization of the site. Almost all of the companies business was from referrals and previous connections, so one of our goals was to create a website that was pleasant to look at but helped to grow the business online instead of only from referrals. Our goal with this project was to make sure we created a super easy site to use so users weren't confused about the next steps, especially contacting them. We wanted to make sure the Contact section was easy to find and separated from everything else so we used a different color scheme and made sure the menu followed you down the page.
02. Design
We used the logo that was previously created but we changed the colors on the logo to give it a little more pop. This lead us to darken both the red and the blue colors. They wanted font that was easy to read so we chose to use a sans-serif font for both headers and body. We used "Bebas Neus" for a stronger thicker heading and "Montserrat" for the body font. We didn't have much in the way of photo assets so I was forced to utilize stock photos to get the necessary images. We had been working on SEO so our rankings were fairly good in the Firestone Area, but we wanted to make sure we were able to expand to other Service Areas in Northern Colorado. To improve Google's understanding of the pages we included JSON-LD schema markup along with HTML5 markup to guide search engines.
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Montserrat
03. Technology
The Colorado Proud 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 like Bootstrap 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 Reset.css. We don't utilize templates so all website coding was done by hand using the Brackets code editor. The Ace of Diamonds 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 is a screaming fast 1.2 - 1.4 seconds per page. CSS and javascript animation was created by using the following libraries Animate.css, Hover.css, & T-Scroll.css. Other code and libraries used include Modernizr, jQuery, Akismet 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
