VTHouse.com Website Design

VTHouse.com was born as a proposal to my parents back in the late 90's as a site I could build for them to help with one simple goal - promote their vacation rental home in Quechee, Vermont to prospective renters. The house was built in the late 80's and has been enjoyed by many satisfied guests over the years...many of them return visitors on subsequent trips. To increase awareness of the fun times to be had in Quechee and the fact that our home is a great place to stay, I built this website rather than be completely reliant on the real estate/rental brokers for finding interested renters.

Over the years, the website has grown and evolved from a couple of pages to what it is today with all of the content and pictures you hopefully took a couple minutes to enjoy. It has been a fun learning experience to build the site in my spare time. I have certainly relied on the expertise of others and leveraged some standard design principles to keep it as clean and easy to use as possible but I've also learned a fair amount to consider myself satisfactory in CSS, Perl, PHP, RSS, site tagging as well as the fun systems out there to help measure the effectiveness of my efforts, namely Google Analytics.

Credits

While building this site I found a lot of great (free) resources out on the web that I found extremely useful. So much so that I feel it would be ungrateful of me not to mention them here. These are just a few of the great sites out there maintained by very talented people wanting to help others like myself:

• Floatutorial helped me in a pinch when I was trying to use as much CSS as possible to control the presentation of the site. I'm a big fan of CSS once I got the hang of it and used this particular tutrial to find a way to convert the Quechee and House photo albums from html tables to pure CSS.
• For a good overview of CSS and the benefits style sheets have to offer over table layouts, take a look at Jon Henshaw's Going Tableless article. This is one of the earlier articles that really got me motivated to strip out as much table structure as possible and leverage the benefits of CSS.
• List-o-Matic helps build CSS formatted lists and navigation elements. I previously relied on javascript for the navigation but realized this wasnt a great idea since many web-crawlers do not process js and no javascript processing means no use of the navigation.
• Layout Gala provided me with the specific style sheets and page layouts used on vthouse.com today. The site is a straightforward collection of single or multiple column layouts that are easy to use and maintain.
• Craigslist has been a great site for bringing traffic to my site. I have used the Vacation Rental sections quite a bit over the years with pretty good success. I love the fact it is free and really has the community feel for people wanting to connect with one another on various topics.
• Google Maps and Google Analytics are 2 amazing services offered by the interenet giant which I added to VTHouse.com in 2005. I have found these two features useful for providing better directions to Quechee, VT and to help me understand how visitors are using the site so that I know what can be improved. Both of these services are powerful, yet easy to use and cheap (read: Free). A great combination!
• I stumbled across Sue Chastain's tutorial on polaroid effects when looking for a way to create interesting treatments of photographs. If you have Photoshop and like the "polaroid-esque" images I have used, be sure to visit her site.
• I host my site with American Internet and while hosting, in my opinion, does not by itself warrant any special credit (after all, good hosting is a requirement nowadays and not a differentiator) I do have a reason for listing them. On numerous occassions over the years, I have found myself in a position to send an email to their tech support group and Ryan Flowers has been extremely helpful in responding to my questions in a quick/accurate fashion. Ryan has helped with a few requests and has provided some additional info to help me troublehoot some of my code which is what I feel is worth mentioning here.

Shameless Plug

If you like what you see and have any interest in a website for your own needs, please feel free to contact me via email.

Regards,

John Banta