Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media

Tamarack Custom Builders

November 11th, 2011

Tama­rack Cus­tom Builders are known for apply­ing sus­tain­able ideas to their cus­tom built homes and remod­els. Owner Mike Potts and his tal­ented crew were some of the first in the Mar­quette area to embrace green and sus­tain­able build­ing tech­niques. I designed and devel­oped a web site for Tama­rack Cus­tom Builders ear­lier this year. The site includes a blog, a sec­tion to show­case the var­i­ous projects they’ve done, and of course the usual infor­ma­tion about and meth­ods to make con­tact with them.

Some notable fea­tures of the site are:

1. @font-face

A rel­a­tively new method for includ­ing dif­fer­ent fonts called @font-face was used exten­sively to embed­ded the Archi­tects­Daugh­ter font through­out the site.

2. Dynamic Page Creation

The home­page is cre­ated dynam­i­cally and includes con­tent from three dif­fer­ent pages. At the top is the first para­graph from the About page. In the Fea­tured Project sec­tion, a link to one ran­domly selected project and its accom­pa­ny­ing images are shown. Because its ran­dom, the home­page looks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent each time it is loaded. The Lat­est Blog Posts sec­tion dis­plays only the most recent blog posts.

On the Projects page, all of the projects are listed in ran­dom order. These are added dynam­i­cally from the Project sub-pages. Each one includes a link and (up to) three images from each project’s photo gallery.

3. Photo Gallery and Slideshow

For each project, details and a thumb­nail photo gallery are pro­vided. A click on one of the thumb­nails brings up the full size image in an over­lay win­dow where it cycles through the images in the gallery like a slideshow.

4. Con­tent Management

The Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (Word­Press) is set up to make it very easy for Tama­rack Cus­tom Builders to add more projects and pho­tos in the future.

The site is light and earthy. I used a cream back­ground, brown text, and green links. Also, sev­eral shades of green and yel­low were used in the side­bar. The sec­tion titles on the home­page were rotated –6 degrees to make them more inter­est­ing. The nav­i­ga­tion links employ unique styles for hover, active, and cur­rent page states. The cur­rent page state pre­vents the link from acti­vat­ing and thereby reload­ing the page.

There are also cus­tom styled date boxes and com­ment bub­bles for the blog posts. All images are given a spe­cial bor­der that uses a back­ground image as well as a box-shadow to cre­ate crisp frames for pho­tos that seem to jump out of the page.

Tama­rack Cus­tom Builders truly care about their work, and their new web site clearly shows why.

Check out tamarackcustom.com to see the web site for yourself.

Tags: Marquette, Michigan, Tamarack Custom Builders, Web Design

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