For a major rebuild of the one page New Zealand Tour Guide site I focused on speed and built a snappy little site with the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS producing a site that loads dramatically faster and consumes far fewer resources than what was there before.
I have just finished working on an update to the www.priestsheetmetal.co.nz website. The original site was relatively simple, for a company that has been operating sixty plus years in an industry that isn’t hugely technical as the sheetmetal industry is, the fax number is important on the footer, the analytics show more people using the site on desktop than phones but they needed a presence without a large budget and now we are just slowly moving towards something more exciting.
The content has slightly updated and we have moved away from a bunch of the text for the site being tied up in the video where it was moving and less readable. Adding more background colors adds hierarchy to the elements of the page in a logical order.
With a relatively small update the site still has elements from foundation running the backend but most of the new elements have been built on CSS grid giving a flexibility with the scaling of the site between phone and desktops.
This is something more modern for a pretty traditional company, the last round of cards had the cell phone too big and central which resulted in a lot of calls and texts which at least means print still works.
A good friend of mine has been busy building a tiny house that he’s also going to be renting out so that needed a logo, we’ve got a few versions of whats going on and we’re going to use it in a few different way but for right now this is the basic logo.
In a really nice turn of events it kinda made sense to pick up the iPhone X, I grabbed it the day I jumped on the road but it was a blur of using a real camera most of the time, I got home and got to put the camera to the test with a few friends for a Snowledge video around the local resort.
I’ve just finished putting together a new theme for Katerina which you can explore on http://katerina.co.nz. The site is built on a WordPress CMS with woo commerce for the products, the theme is developed on top of foundation.
I didn’t ride everyday but I did ride every month and every month theres something pretty all time to do, thanks to all the friends who did this with me.
New Zealand will always be home, even if I don’t call it home day to day so having the chance to get back and hang out with family and friends but also sneak in our fair share of days on the hill.
Finishing up Cascadia took a lot longer than these final climbs but it was also pretty amazing and kinda a bad idea to take a full camera bag up Mt. Shasta in a day, I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to tho.
For longer than I should probably admit I’ve been working on this piece, when I moved down to Queenstown we had a real good collection of vinyl, another year later I started messing around with 3 axis gimbals and then finally this spring we got some of the snow shots to start editing it up, I had to get Alex Bowater’s help on it as well but it’s something I’m happy with.
Ben was the one that came up with the name, basing it on this being the last track of Ray Charles, Yes Indeed album and the last days of spring, this was filmed literally the last full day I had in New Zealand but what better way to spend it than shredding the old stomping grounds.