Love at First Site: A Few Favorites
It’s a crazy busy time for the Red Sage web production department, and seems like a good time to reflect on and share a few of my favorite web projects… maybe even some of my favorite (and not so favorite) parts about building a website.
A lot of days it’s like solving a puzzle: we take the designs that Mark creates, chop it up into pieces, and reconfigure them to make it come to life as a website. Well, we TRY to make it come to life – some days this process is a lot of fun, other days it’s fraught with foul language and frustration. But no matter what, we always seem to find a way to make it work and there’s a great sense of accomplishment in that.
www.decaturmorgansports.com
One of my favorite projects was the Morgan County Sports website for the Decatur-Morgan County Convention & Visitor’s Bureau. They are a fun group to work with, and because we’d already built their main site, we followed the same basic design but focused on the sports facilities available in Morgan County. The fun part was that when we started to build the directory for the facilities, we designed some custom icons for each sport. You can see them here: http://decaturmorgansports.com/facilities. This site is easy to navigate and full of information, but doesn’t overload the site visitor with more than they need. Sometimes simple really is best!
www.bikehuntsville.com
This site falls into the puzzle solving category – quite literally. If you visit the site and resize the home page, you’ll see that all the images on the home page resize and shuffle into a different order to fit the available size of the device being used. The finished product is really cool, but the build process was a constant struggle between what size images would we need to be and how did the mosaic–style grid moves the images on smaller devices. We finally figured out the perfect size and layout that would work, but even that required some changes to the initial design. It was a lesson learned and one we’ll use again I’m sure.
www.thevillasatnaturewalk.com
This site came along about the same time we started to get some new template structures that were more responsive, so with portions of the website already complete we made the decision to switch the template to the newer framework to allow it to be more mobile friendly and more future-proof. There was definitely a learning curve with the new framework and things that worked well in the past were no longer viable solutions. The finished project is gorgeous, user and mobile friendly, and the customer should be able to keep this same site for several years.