This was a small project for a client that needed their chalet site overhauled. The current one was a mess of old school table markup and was a chore to use so I decided to re-design it from scratch.

The client also expressed some concern over the site’s Google ranking, which was pretty much non-existent for general terms such as “Winterton Chalet” or the even broader “Norfolk Chalet” (both of these search terms now show the site in a favourable ranking). I focussed on a simple and easy to use design that also had a lot of relevant content to aid in SEO. On the front-end side, this was one of the last projects I built with HTML4, but it still maintains a semantic structure to remain accessible and easy for search engines to index.

The booking page uses a table of available dates to show what can be booked. This information is collected with jQuery so that the form dates can be populated. This means the client only has has to update the list of dates to keep everything in sync. Unfortunately a CMS was outside of the scope of this project (and in hindsight I perhaps should have used Google Calendar).

Interestingly the fallback for IE6 uses Andy Clarke’s Universal Stylesheet. This saved a lot of time during development.