My website is for an imaginary construction company with an owner who is passionate about sustainable energy usage in Alaska. So, besides traditional construction, he works with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) and the Engineering Departments at UAF to test alternative building methods and materials which may have practical applications in Alaska. Because transportation and freight costs to rural areas can be prohibitively high, the best designs would use abundant and cheap local materials with minimal outside resources, equipment, and manpower.
So, I imagined that the owner of Creative Construction started with a few test cabins made from various alternative materials then rented them to short-term, “work-for-rent” visitors and eco-tourists so the conditions for testing the effectiveness of each design would be more realistic than with an unoccupied building. The cabin rentals also help pay for the project. The site suggests that Creative Construction has big plans in the future to extend both the research and tourism aspects of the site into a mini eco-village.
I tried to use the web design guidelines to make a website that would be pleasing to the eye and intuitive to navigate. I personally like warm earth and wood tones and I thought they would also conveyed the feeling of a construction company. But, since the page was for a professional business and research site, I didn’t want it to look too playful. The page represents a company that is focused on building in Alaska so the site also needed to reflect something of the state; the splash of color provided by the mountainscape brightens an otherwise fairly dull page and gives a backdrop for the navigation buttons.
The intended audience is people interested in sustainable, energy efficient construction, especially in places as inhospitable and remote as rural Alaska, amateur builders and energy enthusiasts, and tourists. I imagine most of these people would be searching the Internet using a typical home workstation or laptop computer.
Sorry if the image quality is poor. I couldn’t get the original Adobe Illustrator file past network security.