This has been ‘soft launched’ for a while, but now all of the content has been uploaded so I can show it to people – the new website for Nicklin Builders.
They’re a firm of builders based in Lancing who do work all across Sussex. They live opposite my parents and have done work on their house, and I’m happy to both show their website and also recommend their work.
The excellent design work was by Megan Sayers, who worked with a very poor brief – they needed something good looking which would also fit in with the printed stationery they’ve been using for years. Megan subtly updated their logo, and designed around the limitations of their printed material while still giving the website a great look. She also had to work around the content area being updatable by the client, so it could be any length and contain one or many images. I’m very happy with the work Megan did, and so are Steve and Harry, the clients.
The HTML is built in HTML5, using HTML5Boilerplate to kickstart the code and get Javascript which helps Internet Explorer understand the more modern tags being used. There isn’t any whizzy interactive stuff on the site, so it could have been built with HTML4 quite happily.
So they could update the site themselves, I installed Perch which has a friendly interface, especially if you’ve not done such things in the past. Being a site for a family friend, the job was on a tight budget and Perch offered an excellent way to get a well tested content management system without having to spend long on integrating it in to the HTML of the website.
The only problem I hit in the project was Perch’s Gallery plugin breaking. Some poking around revealed this was caused by mistakenly selecting a directory to upload when selecting a large number of images to put in to the gallery. A quick fix was to just wipe the gallery database table and re-upload the images as that process is so simple.
If you live in Sussex and need a builder, please give Nicklin a call. They’ll come and give you a free quote and can explain what they can do and what they’ve done before. They’ve been going for over forty years, so they know their stuff.