Deckorators

Without question, the largest site rebuild I worked on in at UFP was easily Deckorators. At 130+ pages and a possibility of switching to e-commerce, I was prepared to sign my life away. And almost did.

In the end, it was totally worth it. I think it ended up looking wonderful.

[Too Many Cooks]

The original layout was not too bad. My critiques were that the type was too small to be legible on screens, the layout was not totally consistent in places it should be, and the navigation was confusing.

More than anything else though: it wasn’t natively responsive, and the original template didn’t lend it self to a very friendly adaptation — so that was a big requirement of the new design. But at least the branding was solid and the photography was definitely attractive.

The design had to get carried out in two phases, due to the sheer size of the site and the amount of resources we had available to allocate to it. The first was to get the core functionality and look of what the “pro” side of the site would look like (if you’re unsure of what the difference between the two might function like, compare something like homedepot.com and homedepot.com/pro), and the second was to follow that design through to the rest of the site.

Deckorators does tend to go to a lot of trade shows though, and the bright side of that is that there was generally a one-page RSVP or informational that had to be updated on the website, so I don’t get bored. A couple of good examples would be one for DeckExpo 2014 and the Go Beyond Ordinary page, which was updated with anything from trade show info, warranties, or new changes to the product lines. I typically did the full design and front-end development for these, which is always nice. Unless something goes wrong; you have no one to forward on the blame to.