Guest House

I got lucky. But luck isn’t the whole story – rather countless of hours of dedication; countless of hours of learning web development, marketing, and much more. All this with a gentle and natural smile on my face (mostly). The following is my short story of how I came to co-own a Guest House and create its website.

My good friend Ida got lucky too. She got the opportunity to inherit a Guest House from her lovely grandfather. She asked me if we had it in us to do it together. With a sweat drop on our foreheads, we said yes to life – we can’t miss out on such an opportunity. If life hands me lemons, I turn inwards and ask myself: “do I want lemons?”.

Quite immediately we realized that the current Guest House website needed a drastic rebeautification (yes, that’s the word I use). We didn’t have the money to hire a web designer, and since I had plenty of extra time on my hands, I took this opportunity to learn web development myself. We also needed an online booking system that didn’t rely on a third party. Here I showcase the five key elements of our multilingual business website.

So this is the first impression, which I obviously wanted to be as good as possible. I thought: “what would show the island’s tranquility better than a simple picture. Well a video of course!”. Now, I didn’t have any professional tool to shoot a video with, but I knew that my Galaxy S5 Mini had an amazing macro lens. Hey, you gotta’ use what you got, right? After some editing, this is the end result (but much smoother on the actual website):

To make it all more personal, I created a blog called “The Life on Nötö” (Nötö being the island on which the Guest House in situated). We couple our writing with high-quality pictures shot with a DSLR camera.

Nothing is complete without beautiful design. I used a prebuilt theme, but with the help of HTML, Javascript and CSS, I have highly tweaked and modified the theme to our needs. Nowadays if I have a webdesign vision, I can most likely create it. The internet is my primary teacher.

Now to the actual heart of the online business – the online booking system. For a whole year we relied on Booking.com, which worked, but due to the inhumane amount of commission they take, we decided we needed our own non-third party system as well. After a whole lot of digging and testing different plugins, I found one that could work. Though, it needed a whole lot of tweaking to fit our needs. Thanks to this, I’ve learned a whole lot more about the interconnectedness between different web development languages.

You can find our booking system here. Following is a couple of screenshots of it:

I love contrasts, so to make something stick out. Therefore I used a so called lightbox, where the room reservation window opens in front of a black background:

Used a popular e-commerce plugin, WooCommerce, to handle the check-out:

Last, but not least. Today we all know that all websites need to be optimized for all devices, be it a PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. To make everything optimized for all screens is indeed a time consuming process, but it is well worth it in the long run. I have done my best to optimize this, and it all works… until WordPress releases another update… That’s why a regular check has to be in order. The more complex the site is (e.g. with an integrated booking system), the more likely optimization problems are to arise in the future.

I use an online service called BrowserStack to double check that the website is device-friendly. Following are screenshots of the mobile version of the site:

Every now and then I check back to our website to see that everything’s in order. Luckily I can do this while I travel around, which is one of my biggest passions! I probably won’t create this big of a site in a while, but if you want help creating a smaller business or personal site; a beautiful simple site tailored for your brand’s personality, then I can probably be your guy! Contact me here 🙂

Have a good one, and in the meanwhile, read about the other stuff I’ve done here!