Kruegelisms (Michele Kruegel) designed, developed and produced this site based on the updated needs of Pete Newman and his company, Prairie Home Inspection Services.
Pete had found that his business had outgrown his previous site. With many fantastic customer reviews and the desire to highlight his services for Homeowner Associations we needed to give his site a facelift and a content organization overhaul.
This overhaul included organizing the content into user-based groups based on his services. Current home owners needs are quite different from a home buyers needs. The resulting effect allows a user to immediately click through to the information specific to their situation.
We also wanted to elevate the role of the testimonial. The previous site only shared testimonials on a dedicated page. As a service provider in a market with many competitors, testimonials are a key component to increasing interest and business. Since Prairie Home Inspection is an Angie's List Super Service Award winner and is an extremely respected company, two steps were taken to show how much Pete's previous customers appreciate his honestly and integrity. First, a link to Prairie Home Insepction Services' Angie's List award was posted on every page. Then, relevant testimonials were chosen for each page and included througout the site.
A primary long-term goal was to create a website that is easy to manage via Adobe Dreamweaver templates.
Visual Assets
All of the beautiful photographs were taken By Karen Popowski and integrated as the primary visual feature throughout the site.
Michele Kruegel reworked the previous logo. The font used, Desdemona Regular is an outlined font that visually brakes down at small sizes and resolutions. Filling in the font and choosing colors that worked into his Prairie themed site, as well as consolidating the company name onto two lines helped unify the logo while maintaining it's original intent.
Typography
Trebuchet was used for body copy, page titles and headers. Trebuchet was chosen to compliment to the logo fonto, Desdemona.
Technical
Adobe Photoshop and TextMate were used to design and hand-code this site. The sit was then built in Dreamweaver using templates for PHIS to self-manage content in the future. The site is authored using structural XHTML, and complies with the 1.0 transitional web standards as set by the W3C. This web site validates as CSS level 2. It also uses SSI technology for universal content.
AJAX scripts used for the rotating imageon the home page are courtesy of other people much smarter than myself who selflessly share their work. Rotating Includes were created by Dynamicdrive.com.