Jan 2011

Bakewell Holiday Cottages

This was a site I developed for my step father who has been renovating two adjoining cottages in Bakewell for use as holiday cottages.

It was put together using an extreme beta of the CMS used for this site. I decided very early on that Drupal was overkill. Not only in footprint but even the technical expertise required to manage Drupal content was going to be too high.

I chose to take this opportunity to rewrite by own WebCMS (that had been gathering dust, but was still very active on a number of sites), The primary goal was to make it as simple as possible. I have no intention of it ever trying to rival Drupal, but I also have no intention of using Drupal for my own website either.

I structured the site in am SEO friendly fashion and infact after only a matter of weeks the site was appearing on the first page of google (searching for "holiday cottages bakewell") and at the time of writing this article (17th April, 2012) a search for "holiday cottages bakewell" places the website at number one after the Ads.

The site has a gallery (which can be embedded into any page on the site). It uses my tried and tested "image thumbnailer" class to produce thumbnails. Over the top of the displaying of images, it uses JQuery and LightBox2 to produce the nice pop-ups for viewing full size version of the images.

The CMS behind it uses the local URI's as the page identifiers and allows you to define Title, Keywords and Description for the page, as well as the main content. The WYSIWYG editor that I use is TinyMCE, as it's nice, simple, customisable as extend-able.

I can not take any credit for the availability calendar used on the site. As there was not requirement for an online booking system, I felt that the Ajax Availability Calendar developed by Chris Bolson would fit quite nicely.

 

URL: http://www.bakewellholidaycottages.co.uk/

Screen shots

This site uses cookies, please read my cookie policy.