Case Study: Four Seasons Landscaping and Property Care

The team at Four Seasons really wanted to connect with their customers and the greater Toronto community in which they served. Their previous website left a lot to be desired. Being based on simple php/xhtml pages there really wasn’t much to salvage from the old website except the content and the SEO keywords that helped rank them highly on Google.

Kevllar set out to create a brand new Four Seasons online experience with a content management system, social media feeds, dynamic sliders, font awesome integration, localized weather widget and many more features that help to create a richer online experience. An experience that connects the team to their customers and delivers useful content and tips to give back to the community it supports.

Kevin truly is the “Mike Holmes” of website design. He rebuilt our website and we couldn’t be happier.

Michael Hua, Four Seasons Property Care and Landscaping

Some of the challenges were to keep the essence of what made the previous website popular and to bring it the new website in a completely new form factor. Obviously the team wanted to keep the SEO and link juice intact upon rebuilding the new site. The old site also had a simplicity that was a key factor in converting potential visitors to actual leads. So we didn’t want to obscure any of that during the design process. The main navigation remains very simple and in many ways the website just looks like a more polished and refined version of the old website. It remains very familiar and yet it’s new features are undoubtably powerful online tools

47% of Canadians now report using a Smartphone, a significant increase over 2012, when 34% of Canadians reported using such a device

Source: New Media

Four Seasons 2.0

With the increase in smartphone use just from 2012 I always recommend my clients choose a path for a more “responsive” online experience. Responsive is the new buzz word in the industry but it just means that we should build websites that ‘adapt’ to a visitor’s display, no matter what kind of device they are using. The Four Seasons website does just that. Mobile users visiting the site will be presented with a smaller experience catered to them.

This serves as a tremendous opportunity for businesses to connect with customers who would otherwise have difficulty accessing the website because of their device. Kevllar builds responsive websites that literally transform to accomodate smaller or larger screens. Now small businesses can tap into an entire demographic of users without paying a premium to build a separate website for each device. For this reason responsive design is often less expensive to develop.  It saves you money and works universally on all devices. There’s clearly no reason not to opt for a responsive website.

Responsive design saves you money and works universally on all devices.

Some of my favourite features of the new site, is the built in use of the Font Awesome Icon font set. I literally have hundreds of icons at my disposal and because they are fonts. They scale and look perfect even on high resolution displays. The jQuery filtering of the gallery also makes me giddy. The web has truly come a long way and it makes developing that much more enjoyable. I’m excited for the future of web and for the future projects to come my way.

P.S. Follow me on Twitter to find out when the Four Seasons website will go live! @kevllarinc