July 01, 2018 / by DT Diepstra / In design, development, spotlight
About making the website 'everything but lola'.
Dushi Blue was challenged by Erika Sanders to build a custom website meeting specific criteria for the Shop and Sleep concept: “Everything But Lola. It’s a project about inspiration, Bonaire, apartment rentals, and more.
the challenge, Width, and Height…
In short, the task described that the website should be multiple ‘sections’ and each section would be containing a slideshow holding photos for the specific topic that the section describes using photos.
Images speak more than words.
We all have seen sliders on the internet presenting pictures and images, but to have a slider consisting of two photos per slide, and both had to be evenly divided over the entire width of the screen, and filling the full hight of the page. This turned out to be a whole new challenge for Dushi Blue.
Everything but standard
Now, a typical slide holds just one image, and our challenge was to have two images evenly divided over the entire width of the screen. This soon turned out not to be the biggest challenge, since there are plenty of gallery scripts available on the internet, and sure enough we found a good solution in open-source package widely available.
Next up was making the slides cover the entire Hight of the screen. Again we resided in the open-source community and found a great solution converting each dedicated section to the full height of the page.
There is (always) more…
Having found the packages and scripts needed for the project, it was time to tie everything up together, at least.. that’s what we thought..
None of the scripts turned out to play nicely together, and even in the development environment, the page was extremely slow due to all the images. Back to the drawing board.
Google Pagespeed 9+
After customizing the scripts, heavily manipulating the photos and adding lazy-loading to the sections of the website, we gained significant speed improvements and we measured a fantastic 90 percentile score on Google Pagespeed!
Mission completed!
Nothing beats the day you finally launch the website and you’ll see the result of all the hard work. The reactions and feedback were overwhelmingly positive and the customer was more than happy!
We want to thank Erika and everythingbutlola.com for her kind words and feedback, and it was our pleasure to work with you! We think the project is a huge success, and we are very proud we could have made this happen for you!
Dushi Blue has built our website www.everythingbutlola.com. We can recommend this company to everybody.
It is important a website reflects exactly what you want to send out to the world. The company building your website needs to understand your vision and has to be able to follow the creative process which is in your head and translate it to the technical details necessary to actually built the website. Although we only like the creative process, DT from Dushi Blue made the technical process even enjoyable (as long as he didn’t get too much into detail 😉). The website is exactly as we had in mind, so thank you and good luck with your next project!
Erika Sanders, everythingbutlola.com