With the Habitat1 web site, less was definitely more. This Drupal-based, CMS driven website uses a clean, simplistic design and colour-rich images to showcase this client’s modern and eclectic architectural and interior design work.

The home page was quite an undertaking but came out brilliantly. Unbeknownst to the site visitor, the large rotating Flash image on the page automatically scales to the size of their screen. For example, users with large monitors (becoming increasingly popular) are greeted with a larger-than-normal image and those with smaller screens also enjoy images that scale as large as their screen can accommodate.

In keeping in theme with this client’s business, architectural and interior design, we carried the image-scaling design elements throughout the site. The projects page, for instance, features a central image that changes size as the screen resizes.

With a client like this, a picture most certainly says a thousand words. This is why we centered the entire site on visual examples of their work. To bring these images to life, we leveraged custom Javascript for the mouseovers.

Take note of how the appropriate link is highlighted when the user hovers over either the corresponding project link on the side or the image in the middle.

The administrative aspects of this site have also been simplified to only present the tools the client needs. We removed the inordinate amounts of sub-menus, configuration pages and settings forms that reside in a typical CMS site.

Since the site went live, Habitat1 informed us that it has been asked, on several occasions, who developed their site. Such validation of our work is certainly gratifying and appreciated.