Holiday Home / Lodge Tourism Business Website

Gairnshiel Lodge is a Highlands of Scotland holiday business providing accomodation as a B&B and Weekend rental. Based near Balmoral between Braemar and Ballater. 

Problem: Owner used a 'Free' Site Builder but Site is too hard to modify

Website Building tools are effective and very cheap for simple 1-6 page Business Card type websites. A good start for a Small Business. However this website had some sophisticated features such as Image Maps to enable people to click on layouts of the floor plan of the building to view room pictures. These Visual 'Drag and Drop' type tools including Frontpage and many Dreamweaver websites quickly degenerate into non standards compliant code. On the surface they look okay but underneath there is a mess. This makes them slow to load, unreliable in different browsers, hard to modify, unportable to better CMS tools and they perform poorly in Search Engines. 

Solutions: Re-Developed website using Standards Compliant XHTML and CSS

I rebuilt the site to exactly the same design using XHTML and CSS. The former is the Structure of the website and CSS is the Styling applied (font colours, dimensions of blocks etc).

Outcome: Efficient Underlying Code providing Flexibility and Maintainability

The underlying code is now properly formed meeting web standards. The pages are easier to modify (by a technically proficient website owner). SEO is much improved. Additionally, the site is now in a form which can be more easily ported into a CMS to permit easy updating of content by non-technically proficent editors).