The client contacted me about creating a site for their apartment sales business. They were looking for something promotional, but were also interested in accepting bookings online.
The design brief was nice and flexible, requiring only the following elements: A palm tree and a sunset.
Site Details
I reused the foliage illustration minus the palm trees to tie the footer back to the header. There are actually two footers in this site, one like the above with a black illustration and a widgetised area and one with no widget area and a green foliage illustration. Both the header and footer illustrations are designed to repeat seamlessly if a user happens to have a really wide screen.
Development
The site features an availability calendar for each of the rooms and integration with PayPal so that they could accept payments for deposits online.
It also supports pricing for different seasons (low, mid and high), price breaks (at one week and four week length stays) and a marker to show whether or not the room was available.
The calendar is a custom built PHP Class that works using AJAX where available, falling back to using GET variables to navigate if the user has JavaScript disabled or if their browser doesn’t support it.
The Bookings Page allows a user to select a room and then it displays the prices and availability for that room. The user can select the dates they want and the form then checks to make sure that the dates are available, that they aren’t in the past or too far in the future and then, if everything’s OK, it works out the full price based on the season the want to visit. It then calculates 35% of this price and creates a PayPal button, inviting the user to confirm their booking with the payment of the deposit.
