I built a custom solution for a vacation home rental company. The company owns several properties in the South Orange County area. They have listings on AirBNB and other travel accommodation websites, but wanted their own website to have more control over the way properties are presented and better controls for their search engine optimization efforts.
The overall goal was to create an attractive website that would encourage potential customers to book a rental by displaying all the property features in an easy-to-read design with beautiful photos of each. At the same time though, the company needed people with no programming knowledge to be able to maintain the website. The result is a user-friendly back end that makes it possible for every part of the website to be maintained with minimal effort.
- Photo galleries were setup for each property so that the company could maintain the images on their own.
- The “Featured Properties” on the homepage of the website appear there by simply adding a tag to each page.
- The AirBNB customer reviews on the homepage are totally automatic, but can be limited with a few mouse clicks in the configuration panel.
- The local experiences page is maintained via back-end forms that are no more complicated than the bookmark manager in every web browser.
- The properties map is configured through back-end forms. The company just enters addresses they want to appear on the map.
- The contact form can be routed to any company contact or list of contacts as needed through the back-end settings.
- Adding property listing videos is as simple as copying and pasting the video URL to the video form field.
- Most importantly, the entire content of the property listing pages is done via custom form fields. That way every property listing page conforms to the same design. The site admin simply fills in each form field with content to display on the page. Only basic HTML knowledge (paragraph tags, bold, etc.) is required to maintain the listings. They don’t need to worry about table coding or making sure every page looks consistent. Essentially, I created a data-driven WordPress website.
Even the “Check Availability” calls to action are driven by a simple form field in the back end.
