Colophon
The web has been a massive, world-wide collaboration among individuals and companies leading to the amazing sites being built today.
The Evermore Enterprises website is a mobile-first, responsive, standards-compliant, HTML5 and CSS3 project. That means that it was designed to look good and work well on a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets and notebook and desktop computers. It is optimized to provide fast load times, even on devices with slow connections.
The core of the Evermore site is the ECMS2 system, the same one we use to build our custom web-based business applications. It provides the core functionality and organization that makes it all work well.
It may seem a cliché but, the Evermore site stands on the shoulders of giants. We have selected, integrated and, been inspired by the best work of developers and designers all of the globe. Here are some of them:
320 and Up
Andrew Clarke‘s 320 and Up is a best-of-breed package of responsive design tools. We used it as a starting point for building our own variant.
LESS CSS
LESS CSS is a dynamic stylesheet language that extends CSS to provide easier organization and authoring. For optimal performance, our build process compiles our less files into plain CSS for deployment. Future versions of our site are likely to use a similar language called SASS.
jQuery
jQuery is a powerful JavaScript library that makes it easier to build interactive features for websites. Our Contact form is enhanced with jQuery.
Adaptive Images
Responsive web design endevors to produce a pleasant experience for visitors on a variety of devices. One of the major stumbling blocks has been images. Big, pretty images are great on your desktop display but, you typically don‘t need a large, high-resolution image on your smart phone. Worse, sending that high-resolution image over your cellular data connection is usually slower and, eats up your data plan.
The current state of the art for this is to detect the visitor‘s display resolution and, send an image optimized for it. Adaptive Images is the current best-of-breed implementation of that approach.
Jura
Daniel Johnson‘s excellent Jura font is used for our headings. We like the clean, futuristic feel.
Open Sans
The body text on the site (for visitors and devices that support webfonts) is set in Steve Matteson‘s Open Sans font. It is optimized for legibility and easy reading.
Responsive Nav
We built our main navigation menu on the best-of-breed model from Viljami Salminen. At smaller sizes, our menu follow the standard convention for mobile devices. On notebook and desktop systems, it becomes a normal horizontal header menu.
Responsive Slider without JavaScript
The content slider on our main page is based on this one by Ian Hansson. We found it elegant and flexible. Unlike most sliders, this one does not require visitors to have JavaScript support.
Formalize
Nathan Smith‘s Formalize is a CSS and JavaScript addition that helps to standardize the appearance and function of forms on web pages. It helps us to be sure our forms work consistently and correctly on a variety of devices and software.