Redwood Glass and Windows is a Fortuna, California based glass installation company with a fantastic reputation in the local community for high quality installations and outstanding customer service. They originally approached EvenVision back in 2013 looking for a visually clean and beautiful website to display their successful work throughout Humboldt that would help them stand up and out from their competition. In 2016 they asked us for a user friendly refresh of their 2013 website.
Make their site user friendly across multiple mediums, and update aesthetics to provide a more clean experience.
We decided that this would also be an opportunity to work on typographic elements, in addition to transitioning their site into a responsive mobile theme.
A fully responsive website that keeps the original aesthetic while cleaning up the overall feel and providing a much more user friendly experience.
With an existing relationship with the client we were able to move quickly and tackle the project head-on. Ultimately when Ross called us up, we were all eager to dive back into the code, like working for an old friend. Our team has learned a lot in the past 3 years, so when refreshing the site we wanted to focus on a more user friendly experience through these three things: Responsive Theme, Typography, Speed.
Responsive Theme
A responsive theme update allows for the website to respond to different screen sizes, and can therefore accommodate an myriad of different devices and screen resolutions. One major aspect of a user-friendly site is providing a navigation that is easy to utilize on small screens and doesn’t require “zoom & pinch.” We accomplished this by making the main navigation a full screen trigger on small screens, in addition to numerous careful changes throughout the site that work in tandem to create a completely responsive website.
Quality Typography
Our next strategy was typography - the art of type, and for Redwood Glass and Windows we knew that one simple update to their system would do magic. This consisted of higher quality typefaces that wouldn’t suffer from degradation across different devices and especially on small screens. By tapping into professionally designed web specific typefaces from Hoefler & Co, the website content became significantly easier to read no matter the resolution of the screen. There was careful consider taken to select beautifully paired typefaces which provided the aesthetic of “official lighthearted-elegance” that best suited the client. Check it out for yourself on their website.
Loading Speed
The last element we considerated was speed; which can often be forgotten within the web world. The original site was rather slow to load as it made use of numerous raster graphics to present a beautiful display and framework for the client’s photography. During the overhaul of the site we decided one core focus would be a quicker load time for users which we accomplished by coding as much of the original raster elements in CSS. Not only did extensive CSS graphic elements allow for a much smoother website experience, but also provided the added benefit of allowing these elements to be morphed organically depending on the size of the device. Additionally this gave the added benefit of a bump in SEO, as Google tracks site loading speed within their search indexing systems.
Refreshing Redwood Glass and Windows was a fantastic opportunity for our client to capitalize on a pre-existing relationship and receive real value and tangible user friendly updates to their online presence.
Check out the Refresh for yourself!
