E&J Cabinets
E&J Cabinets is a local cabinet and millwork shop in Arvada Colorado. They have been in business for over 40 years. They are a mid-sized shop consisting of over 40 employees. They have state of the art equipment able to produce a wide variety of products. The company is a family owned company with commitment to establishing great working relationships with their customers.
01. Approach
The previous website had been done almost 7 years previously so they were looking for a refresh. They weren't in a huge hurry to get started until the Wordpress hackers struck again and forced the refresh plan to move faster than anticipated. This business had been focused on commercial projects for quite some time so the residential/ retail side of the business had been a little neglected. We wanted to provide a site to users that showed the true capability of E&J Cabinets. We studied several different cabinet sites across the country and decided to go on the concept of "classy luxury". Most retail and residential customers for kitchen cabinets were women so we focused on black background to denote luxury and a gold accent gave use the classy look.
02. Design
This project already had a logo to utilize and we decided to slightly change the colors of the logo to fit the luxury element that we were trying to achieve. We went with a black and gold logo color and used these as the main colors on the website. The black became the main background color and the gold was mainly used as an accent color. The font choices that we went with were meant to be easy to read and luxury so we went with a combination of a sans-serif font "Santral" for the body and a serif font "Sterling" for headlines. Animations were created on hover to add some additional flare to different elements of the website. We designed a search friendly site with schema.org markup along with HTML5 to properly guide search engines. We were proud to see this new website was ranking in the top 3 for both local and traditional rankings in approximately 6 months of being active.
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Sterline
Santral
03. Technology
The E&J Cabinets 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 in order 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 E&J 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 enhancers which were used to speed up page load. 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 ridiculously fast 1.4 - 1.7 seconds seconds per page and a page speed indes ranking in the top 10% of all websites on the Web. 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, Akismet, Cloudflare CDN, Vanilla Lazy Load 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
