Nasco Stone

Nasco Stone manufacture some of the finest cast stone products available today. Their work can be seen across Northumberland and the surrounding regions, often used on imposing and large residences, banks and buildings that are that little bit special. Being based on a site where there has been a quarry for decades brings with it a fine heritage and reputation.

Client Brief

Nasco were very relaxed in how they wanted their site to look and left it to us to achieve an end result that had to convey the quality of their products. The site was a standard company website in many respects but they wanted to include a number of features that would mark it out from your average building industry web design. Their logo was a major part of all their off-line advertising and blues were evident as the primary colour.

Images and Issues

A challenge with Nasco was that all of their photography had been taken on standard 35mm film and they only had brochure copy or existing printed photographs to give us. There were no digital images available and with their work over such a large geographical area there was no hope of getting such images in reasonable time. So, working from their existing literature everything you see on their website is taken from printed material. Scanned, adjusted in Photoshop and cropped - we managed to produce a quality of reproduction that, whilst not as high resolution as standard digital photographs, still puts their product and work across well.

Services Accordion and Gallery

The two particular features we incorporated into this website were the accordion style menu under the Services page and the smooth transitional effects of the Gallery page. The accordion menu was perfectly suited to allowing long titled products to be displayed in a block menu that extends to images and descriptions once clicked. It's a feature we feel gives a little extra style to a website without the need to incur the client significantly increased costs. Similarly, the Gallery transitions and scrollable image bar allow a user to observe Nasco Stone work in an easy to navigate way that is pleasing on the eye.

Project Summary

The Nasco Stone site is an excellent example of producing a company web design with minimal resources from the client. Steve Tuck, Managing Director of Nasco Stone, was delighted with the end result and already has plans to extend it's functionality in future. From a ClarityWeb perspective it was very satisfying to achieve a good standard of image reproduction from low resolution printed copy.