Luxe Blades
Luxe Blades is an artificial turf design and install company based out of Dallas Texas. This business is spearheaded by Nick Ogilivie who has over 20 years of experience in the synthetic turf business. They provide service for clients in South Florida and Denver Colorado as well. Luxe Blades provides artificial turf solutions for a wide variety of different situations including golf courses, high school stadiums, dog boarding facitilities, residential, roof tops, driveways and other commercial applications as well. It will be exciting to see this small business thrive against some of the big players in the industry.
01. Approach
This project wanted to have something a little different than other websites. All sites want an element of class and so did Nick on this project but he also wanted modern and unique as well. Requirements for this project included providing a high end look and feel and giving visitors the feel of elegance. Visitors to the site needed to see some of the impressive clientelle that we had serviced in the past so they would have confidence that Luxe Blades was the right company for the 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. This project also included the need for some lighter background colors to differentiate sections so we matched the original logo colors and found complimentary lighter shades that would give us a matching look and lighter background color. The font choices were "Helvetica Neue" for the headlines and good old "Georgia" for the body. So we combined the sans-serif font in the heading with a very readable serif font for the body.
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Helvetica Neue
03. Technology
This project was 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 Normalize.css. We don't utilize templates so all coding was done by hand using the Brackets code editor. The Luxe team is also able to add blog articles, maintain the verbiage and images on the site by utilizing Perch as the content management system. Every page in the project was tested and confirmed to be W3C compliant with the exception of Lazy loading of images. All css files are modular in nature so Gulp was used to combine and condense all CSS files in the final project. The slowest loading web page according to Webpagetest.com was approximately 1.8 seconds with most pages average loading times being less than 1.7 seconds. 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, MagnificPop, Verlok Lazy Load, Easy Responsive Tabs, Akismet, 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
