carbonhouse blog

The cobbler’s kids.

It is always a tough task creating a website for your own company. We do this all the time for our clients, but as a creative shop we always want to be…well…creative. After many iterations, we decided the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach was best. Get all the good stuff out and available and keep the fluff to a minimum. Really, the problem we were facing was not the look of the site, but the delivery of content.

With that in mind and a blank slate, simplicity became the main goal in the new direction for carbonhouse.com. Building off one of our product sites, venuelements.com, we wanted to keep it uncomplicated, clean and clear, and allow the work to speak for itself. We relied on the typography to create the space, but also improve usability, by providing quick access to all the pertinent information (the good stuff). Taking the single page site concept and amping it up, we used the mootools framework to dynamically deliver the content from our greenhouse content management system and create transitions that aren’t just fluff. These transitions ensure the correct flow of the content to the user and communicate our message.

Design

• Clean, uncluttered design to communicate and focus on work and let the interaction via javascript provide the ‘bling’ or motion
• Single-page format to allow visitors quick access to pertinent information and messaging
• Object-oriented approach to home page spotlight area that showcases recent projects in a less traditional, more unexpected way
• Utilization of sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) to present titles and headers in Helvetica Neue Light, which offers a more sophisticated look than the standardized web font palette.

Technical (all the techy goodness)

• A degradable javascript navigation for users with javascript-disabled browsers allows the site to be navigated while also providing search engine-friendly standard hrefs for our links.
• We utilize AJAX calls with the mootools framework to load page content and project details from our greenhouse CMS, thus avoiding page reload.

Accessibility Benefits

Overall, there are a lot of different ways to handle navigation. By incorporating the degradable javascript within our navigation, we have reduced the possibility of viewers not seeing the site as intended, while increasing the ability of Google and other search engines to find our links.

Author: Taylor Nall