How I Built...

Boutique & Breakfast

Previous Boutique and Breakfast Site

After writing about nothing but Travel for the past 5 months, it’s about time I talked about my work and put the “code” into “Travel & Code”. For those of you that don’t know, I’m a freelance web developer working 50:50 from home and a hot desk in the C4DI co-working space in Hull.

After months of planning, developing, revising and testing I recently launched a redesign of one of my client’s web sites Boutique & Breakfast last Friday. They specialise in providing a hand picked selection of boutique bed and breakfasts around the UK which you can search and filter by various options such as style, area and price.

In the screenshot you can see the previous site which was looking quite old and outdated. While the content and properties were good, it hadn’t kept up with modern design and web technologies which could maximise it’s potential. Over the past year, around half of their visitors were accessing the site using mobile and tablet devices so it was essential the new site worked fluidly across these. The other main focus of the redesign was to de-clutter and provide a fresh and modern vibe that gave the impression of luxury and boutique as soon as you viewed it.

The Technical Bit

After being designed, a prototype was built using the SASS version of the Foundation CSS framework. Once tested and approved by the client the prototype was converted to a WordPress theme which was to provide the content management required. As WordPress is primarily a blogging tool, I created a custom post type for the property listings along with adding a variety of custom fields using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin which provides a user friendly interface for the client to manage their properties. Once all this was set up, I migrated the content across from the previous site using a custom script and activated the Photon CDN function of the Jetpack plugin to enable quick loading of images across a free globally distributed network.

New Boutique and Breakfast Site

Published on January 12, 2015 in Code, How I Built... by Jason and tagged with Boutique, Code, Website, Work.