brandiboyd.com

My latest project has been Call4PilotCars.com, a website for Asherville Pilot Car Express.
The company owners came to me looking for a site that was clean and conveyed modern professionalism with a ‘driving cross country’ feel, got the message across in seconds, and that could be maintained themselves with some training. With little content and no logo or corporate color scheme decided upon, I had nearly free creative reign…that was really fun.

We settled upon using WordPress; the new 2.5 release was in candidate stages when we set up…this caused no small amount of nail biting and teeth gnashing on my end, but I wanted the Hills to have the best experience possible and not to have to learn to work with the old’ WordPress, then turn around and re-learn ‘new’ Wordpress. And I wanted to avoid installing plugins for image galleries and other functionality now included in the core WordPress files…we wanted to reduce maintenance overhead and keep things as simple as possible.

A custom logo was created that establishes an excellent brand image, and we went through several iterations of theme mockups before landing at this one, inspired by the new brand. It is actually not that far from June’s original idea of a simple and traditional layout; but the use of the stunning background image and page opacity makes it seem much more complex. Adding ‘road safety’ related styling such as custom pilot car flag bullets and safety border boxes for emphasis further fleshed out the branding and style to create a truly unique theme.

Training for WordPress as well as ongoing customizations are being provided to allow the site owners to maintain and operate the website internally, cutting overall costs. Hosting and DNS management services were also included in this project.

The Hills have been truly wonderful to work with; it is rare to have a client so explicitly trust a designer’s judgment. They maintain several resources for beginning pilot car operators, including a yahoo group, Pilot Car 101; and are active in their web communities. I look forward to seeing how they use this new platform to present their ideas and company.