Pardon the pun of my post title but I thought it appropriate after staring at construction terminalogy the last few days.

So I was approached to do a simple enough move of hosting and a few updates on a website for Deeside Building and this turned into them changing branding / company to Devine Building. They were happy enough with their existing logo and colours but I made a few suggestions and one thing led to another.

Take their old site and see what I changed.

Now I immediately didn’t like the site. I’m not getting a warm vibe from it .. I’m not getting any professional edge to it. I’m not getting hit with what they do apart from the graphic with the keywords. This would have been fine for me a few years back but once you start to consider what you’re trying to do .. impress end users you’ve to change the way you think slightly.

The site had links to the Recent Projects all listed on the one page so the first thing to do was a bit of a rethink of their branding. Now I think their signage works perfectly well on a construction site but once you move over to a computer I found their colours strange to say the least. I suggested toning it down. Now with sites where you’re trying to highlight a product / photo I find that black is a good colour it works well with warm images. ( Take Safari Club as an example of this ). So keeping their logo (slightly updated with the DEVINE wording) I put it against a black background and changed it to white. The front page of the site while linking to Recent Projects / Available Services / Health and Safety .. wasn’t really doing anything and just adding in an extra click to get to what the customer really wants to see the completed projects. So I opted to include a random display of their recent projects on the front page. The other options are still present in the menu so you’re not really losing anything but we’re now showing some high class construction work on the sites front page. I removed the generic house building image as well from the front page and hey presto you’ve got what I think is a rather nice clean and straight to the point website.

The projects were given individual pages. I ended up creating some banner images … got some text for the projects .. added in some nice javascript popup effects for the photos (and some touch up work with the photos removing artifacts in them that take away from the image .. changing the levels on the images and so on)

You can see an example re the artifacts here ( I do love photoshop )

And so to the final design. Simple, clean and hopefully to the point and highlighting their construction work.

Just catching up with some posts I should have made at the moment.

A little over a week ago Michele Neylon came to me with a small project. Logo design and templating for a website he had acquired Carlow.biz. I love pet projects like this as they are fun / interesting and up and running fairly quickly (at least I hope so when I get involved in them). He has a blog post on it over at Carlow business directory now live

The design is drawing from the Carlow County Crest and its associated colours. The crest features the Red Dragon (also on the Welsh Flag) and the Ermine ( a Heraldic fur representing the winter coat of the stoat … you learn something new every day) Though I must admit I knew about the Ermine already as its one of the key elements on the Breton Flag.

Hopefully for people from Carlow the colour choices make sense (black / red / white), I chose to steer clear of the yellow from the lions. I’m a Galway man at heart and the Galway Colours / Crest always influences designs there so I would guess its similar for Carlow.

Anyways there may be some minor tweaks on the site design over the next while it’ll depend on any feedback thats given.