Designing New design for my guesthouse website

• Website URL:
  
  http://www.lamaisondeleochille.be/
  
  
• Website description:
  With my wife, we had the chance to buy and fully renovate a small house a couple of years ago. The initial idea was to offer a nice and cosy accommodation for our friends and relatives. But we went one step further and proposed it as a vacation property. It's located in the Belgian Ardennes ('a land of forests, rivers and deep valleys crossed by numerous sign-posted footpaths and cycling circuits. A land where Nature is still intact, a land of Medieval castles and ancient hamlets'), close to Bastogne, known worldwide for its famous Battle of the Ardennes during WWII.
  
  Our website is one of the best tools for promoting our guesthouse.
  
  
• The Structure of my website:
  Same as the current one i.e. Home - Property details - Local info & events - Our favorite places - Rates - Contact
  
  All the pages have to be available in four different languages : French - Dutch - English - German
  
  
• My favorite template designs on Free Website Templates:
  - https://freewebsitetemplates.com/website/preschooltemplate/
  I like : no frills, direct access to what our potential guests do care about (pictures, rates and availability, contact), colored static background, sliding gallery from the homepage and sliding pages during navigation.
  
  - https://freewebsitetemplates.com/preview/originarchitectswebsitetemplate/
  I like : menu on the left-hand side, two-columns presentation of the Projects page
  
  - https://freewebsitetemplates.com/website/architectcompany/
  I like : focus on the pictures (more than on the text), sleek design
  
  
• Other websites whose design I like:
  - http://cabourgmonamour.fr/
  I like : general concept. Everything is on one single page with 'jump and scroll' links from the main menu.
  
  - http://www.massvacation.com/
  I like : very clear, colorful, modern.
  
  
• Preferred colors:
  Same as the current ones : #F0FFD0 (background), #83A744 (menu, link, etc...), #6F6F6F (font, main title). Akbar font should also be used for the main title.
  
  
• Notes:
  - All logos, pictures, etc... found on my website can be reused as I'm the only owner.
  - I don't like my current 'Rates' page. It's unclear and a new page is reloaded every time I move from one month to another... It would be great to have a 2 or 3 months calendar for instance.
  - If possible, apply a RWD approach (Responsive Web Design).
  

 

Hello Phil!

You really took the advice of @Dawn! Cool to have you on board. You have a really comprehensive request there, so I'm gonna go on ahead and index this for the queue. You'll be notified when you're on the queue if you'll watch this thread!

 

Hello Ruthe,

Waw, thanks, that was fast !

As all the images on my website are in low-res (small size --> fastest download), I'll upload them in high-res on my Picasa account (+ some others). This will ease your designers' job, I guess.

By the way, I forgot to mention the following : our guesthouse is part of a Belgian tourism organization and we have to incorporate its logo on the website. It can be found here.

PS : I'm still surprised you provide those services for free... Is there a way to make a donation for instance ?

 

As promised, here are two links to some pictures of our guesthouse :

https://plus.google.com/photos/111692524333171792922/albums/5937486435115507265

https://picasaweb.google.com/107885555970832193996/Presentation

Obviously they're all free to use. I'll add some new a bit later.

Have a nice day,
Mildju

 

I'd like to add more details about each page. First thing is a general obvious remark : I don't really want to keep the layouts of my current website. As far as I can see, latest layouts proposed by FWT designers are far better than mine.

1. Home
This one is the masterpiece.
It's the first page accessed by a potential customer and obviously it has to be very attractive.
All pictures (backgound, etc...) can be downloaded either from my depositories given above or from the web (just type 'Ardennes nature' in any web-search tool). I'd like also to have a news feed for publishing some updates occasionally.

I've got a question about your FB/Google+ shortcuts you generally add at the bottom of a template : is this for sharing the website on the visitor's account or a kind of 'Like' button ?

2. Property details
Main idea is simply to display pictures of the guesthouse (+ surrounding area) and related descriptions. Some videos might also be available soon.

3. Local Info & Events
This one can be removed from the new design.

4. Our favorite places
Mainly a list of restaurants (+ links to their respective website) + a link to a wellness center close to the guesthouse.

5. Rates
Main purpose is to give the availabilities during the next months, with the different rates based on the chosen period. There's no need of an online booking system. A visitor has to use the contact form first (or to give a phone call).
I manually update this calendar every time a new reservation is done. And it's not a problem for me to keep going this way.

6. Contact
Address + phone number + location on a Google map + a contact form.

Cheers,
Mildju

 

Love how you're giving us so many details! The more comprehensive you are, the closer we can (hopefully) match our designs to what works for you!

 

I just added a couple of new shots to my Google+ account.

That's how I noticed how fast the ivy has grown up !

 

@Mildju this is a picture of your guesthouse that you recently took?

 

@Ruthe Yes ma'am, a few hours ago ! It was a bit cloudy but no rain.

 

Congratulations! Your template request has been successfully added to the template production queue.

While your request is now in the queue, this post does not guarantee the completion of your request.

In order to better understand the needs of your template request, the FWT team may post you enquiries on this thread from time to time. Should your reply be later than 7 days of our question, we regret that your template request will lose its place in the queue.

As such, please watch this thread and set your preferences to receive e-mail notifications. This way, you will be notified immediately when any of our staff members posts an enquiry.

We will do our best to post the ETA of your template ASAP, and we look forward to working together with you to create a template that best suits your needs!

 

Great news, thanx !

 

Congratulations @Mildju! Some of our designers have begun designing your template request.

Again, this post does not guarantee the completion of your request, and the FWT team may post you enquiries on this thread from time to time. Should your reply be later than 7 days of our question, we regret that your template request may lose its priority.

Keep an eye on this thread for more updates!

 

Yippee, thanks !

​

 

Nice quote, Phil

 

Hi! Here is my design for this request. Thanks.

 

Here's my design.

 

Hi @Alexa

Wow, your design is really impressive ! Thank you so much.

Here are all my comments and questions about it :

1. You keep the font/colors/logo/description that I mentioned in my request and that's an excellent choice. I really do appreciate.
   
2. I love the orange color you added. It's in harmony with the other colors actually. I like also the 'Read more' concept for the latest updates.
   
3. There isn't any picture of our guesthouse. Is it because they're not usable as such ?
4. As your mockup is a static image, can you tell me what's the dynamic behavior in reality ? Home page = main picture + menu at the bottom, then scrolling down to the section linked to the user's selection from the menu (and having the menu always visible) i.e. same way to navigate than http://cabourgmonamour.fr/ ?
   
5. What's the purpose (if any) of the white arrow in a circle below the 'Gîte in the belgian Ardennes' sentence ?
6. Can you please add an easy way (flags or something) to switch from one language to another ?

Cheers,
Phil

 

Hey Phil, can I just jump in here and answer #3 for you? The reason we're not using your images is not that they're not usable – they're gorgeous, actually! – but because as I'm sure you know, the completed template will be made available to the public for download. So in the interest of protecting your images from any unauthorized misuse, we figured it would be better to use stock images instead. It should however be fairly easy to replace them with your own; as you seem from your other posts to be quite comfortable with HTML, this should be no problem for you, right?

Anyway, I'll leave the rest of your questions for @Alexa to answer, but do wait for the other designers to post their works too before you make your final decision! I'm sure you'll love what they have to show you

 

Hey Dawn !

Thanks a lot for clarifying that point. I forgot this new template will be public afterwards. It sounds logic then.

I hope I don't bother too much Alexa with my questions...

 

Well as most of your comments are compliments, I don't think she will mind too much