Eleanor’s Homestay
Eleanor’s Homestay is a vacation rental property located in Northern California. This website lists the property available for rent, the pricing and contact details of Eleanor, the business owner. Used in combination with services like Airbnb, trip advisor and VRBO all help generate traffic towards this business website. Built using WordPress, this website features a photo banner slideshow, information about the vacation property, pricing tables, google maps integration and a blog post sections.
Design
A simple yet very affective business website, after a consultation I established my clients needs, and I received a basic overview of the business and features of the house along with typical activities to do the in area. I began by creating a mock-up of my design in photoshop; I kept the color palette to subtle browns and greens to reflect the landscaping around the property which conveys a earthy, peacefulness to the visitor. I created a page for each of the main important information factors relating to this business. After an approval for the design and few extra additions I began building the website and sent regular updates to my client throughout the development process.
Banner Slideshow
The vacation property is a beautifully kept historic building with a lot of charm and character set in rural Vacaville, California. After consulting with my client I spent the day at the property taking photographs to capture the best lighting for each area of the house throughout the day. Upon reaching the website you are instantly shown a beautiful photo of the front of the house and surrounding area. I was aiming to capture the visitor with a nice banner slideshow displaying four photographs showing off the different rooms around the house.
Photo Galleries
Photo galleries are a great feature to showcase the different rooms, features and views of the property. Images are automatically resized to small thumbnails to save on bandwidth and to improve page loading times; as the visitor clicks on an image a larger sized version is dynamically downloaded and displayed in a viewbox. My client can easily add their own images to any photo gallery or create new photo galleries through the WordPress Visual Composer.
Pricing Tables
The rental fees are displayed in a simple yet pleasant looking HTML table. I applied the styling as a separate piece of code so that my client can add more info the table through the WordPress text editor without disturbing the layout and design which will automatically adapt to different screen sizes.
Blog
My client wanted a blog page so that they could write up new articles about services offered at the property and any news that might be relevant to new guests staying there. Keeping new fresh content appearing on your website will also improve your Google page ranking score. Your search engine ranking will improve the more you can keep your website active by writing new articles, linking with social media integration and sharing link to your website on other platforms and websites.
Google Maps Integration
A Google Maps embedded right into the location webpage shows the location of the property and allows the visitor to save the pin to their Google Maps account as well as get personalized directions without having to leave the website. Several maps can be shown on any page as well as several locations on each map. Using Google Maps integration you can display directions for paths, roads or tours in custom areas or highlight points of interest.
Features
SEO Management
As I develop each website I keep SEO best practices in mind. For example I ensure that there is only ever one H1 tag per page, and that most if not all images have good descriptors in their meta tags (Google has stopped observing meta keywords however) and I optimize all code and images to improve page speed as best I can.
Weekly Backups
I provide a service of making weekly backups for the 12 months for all websites that I develop, after that I charge a yearly fee for this service or it is included for free with my web hosting plans. I keep encrypted backups of all files and database in at least 3 separate locations located around the globe; two of which on different servers and another copy on a local offline hard drive that I keep in a safe. This ensures that should your website be compromised, accidentally deleted or fall victim to a major catastrophe it will be possible to recover all files from the previous week.
Google Analytics
It is important to know your visitors demographics, behaviour on your website and how many are visiting and when. Google provides these tools to use for free. I set up and link these reports directly to each of my clients Google accounts and advise on best industry practices to make the most of the data and how to improve page views.