Our new website for Style-Arrival has been launched this week, replacing their previous website. Style-Arrival provide a variety of chauffeur driven services across the UK, including airport transfers, corporate travel and wedding car hire. Style-Arrival approached us after receiving rebranding proposals from students at the University of Lincoln, of which Style-Arrival liked elements, but none of them provided the full package. We took the elements they liked and used them as a basis to create the new website. The design of the new website is stylish and minimalist, using semi-transparent panels over the large background image. The homepage is particularly minimalist, displaying only the banner (containing the logo and navigation), allowing full view of the background image. The banner is present across the site and contains the company logo, phone numbers, site navigation and a short piece of text that changes depending on the page being viewed. The colour scheme of the site is inspired by the background image, picking out shades of gold, silver and brown.
The page content throughout the site appears above the banner, covering the majority of the background image with a semi-transparent background colour. It was important to make the page content stand out from the background image, particularly as many of the pages contain photos. To achieve this, a shadow was placed around the content panels and filter was positioned over the background image. The content panels typically consist of a sub-menu on the left, a gallery along the top and text below. The sub-menu has the crown logo in the bottom right, slightly clipped, to match the company’s business cards. The content panels vary in size depending on the user’s screen size and to accommodate shorter screens (particularly widescreen laptops) the text area gets a custom scroll bar, which has a narrow track and replaces the rectangle with a miniature crown logo to tie in with Style-Arrival’s new branding. The circle element of the new Style-Arrival logo was also used to create custom social media icons for the Contact page.
The site posed a few technical difficulties, mostly due to the ‘scale to fit’ nature of the site and the support for transparent backgrounds varying from browser to browser. The site is fairly consistent across all major browsers; however, in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 often a choice had to be made between a transparent background and an image, leading to the logo being dropped from some backgrounds or slight differences in transparency levels (due to layering). The image below shows the Contact page in 3D, depicting how the site is layered.
Like all Mamu Computing websites, the new Style-Arrival site has been optimised for search engines and traffic is monitored so Style-Arrival can see just how many people are using their new website.
Unfortunately the existing WordPress blog was not part of our remit, although we did give it a bit of an overhaul: increasing the search engine optimisation, updating the navigation menu and providing guidance on effective blog writing techniques.
Style-Arrival have been very pleased new website and high level of service we provide, so much so they have already recommended our services.