First Impression Hardscapes

Talk about a challenge. A client recently came to our offices on a Friday afternoon looking to get a new website done. The catch was that they had already arranged for some advertising materials to be mailed out with the website address listed, so we had to get it turned around for them in only a week.

At the same time, they wanted to be able to embed a lot of photos and manage that themselves. After all, it gets expensive to hire your web developer to upload photos for you all the time, especially when your site requires highly visual marketing and frequent updates.

We’re very pleased to have been able to rise to the challenge: a week later, the new First Impression Hardscapes site launched.

The header images that automatically rotate are managed via a WordPress page that is otherwise supressed from view. They do require sizing in advance, but our client only needs to upload a set of photos to the page’s gallery, use the drag-and-drop functionality to sort them, and they display in rotation as you see on the site. Getting the rectangular photos to site behind the curved header required some fancy CSS work, too.

On pages like the Rob S. project showcase, we made it even easier. The client uploads a bunch of photos roughly sized for full display (no more than about 600 pixels in either direction) and again, can sort them using simple drag-and-drop.

We automatically take the first image and place a mid-sized version at the top of the page. Then, by simply placing a WordPress shortcode (“lightshow” in brackets,) we take all the images in the page’s gallery and format the thumbnails, pop-ups, and the full-sized slideshow. Easy-peasy!

The lightshow and image rotater functionality came from the fine folks of Project Seven, but getting this to work well with WordPress instead of requiring processing in Dreamweaver was where we got to shine.

Congratulations to John and Mike at First Impression Hardscapes!