Thread: My Rental Hire Site

My Rental Hire Site

Hi All,

So been on the forums for a little while now and have now reached a stage that my site is ready for its review by members of this forum. The site has had some custom work applied and over all I am now happy at the place we are at today, I still have some tweaks to apply to get to my final version of features but so far I am very happy with the outcome and my site member’s feedback as been well received.

So please do take a moment to view my site and let me know what you think:

bouncycastlesforsale.eu

**However please note this is a trading website and currently being used so please do not register any test accounts or post any test items as these will be charged and no refunds will be provided.**

First thing you will notice is that we have gone for a custom design that would reflect our branding and would accommodate the custom features I have added to the site and have in the pipeline, after a lot of reading on the forums and looking at other sites I come up with an idea of how I wanted the design to look and started the search for a developer to take my sketch idea and bring it alive.

The one thing that helped me a lot was these very forums as I found some topics from a very talented designer and would like to take a moment to say a very big thank you to Ruben aka forum member rubencio for all his hard work!

Ruben is a great guy and I could not recommend him enough for his services, he took my idea and together we created my new design. I had some tight deadlines to achieve due to editorial reviews from the press and he took up the challenge and delivered on time!

I had some layout bugs on my site due to previous custom work and asked Ruben if he could review and provide any pointers how to resolve, not only did he tell me what was causing the problem he provided the solutions to resolve so if anyone is looking for custom theme design Ruben is your man and I cannot recommend enough!!

I would also suggest you have a look at his prebuilt child themes some great designs @ CLASSIPRO · ClassiPress ChildThemes & Plugins Market

Apart from the custom design I have also added new features for users and for myself in the backend with some of them being:

• Custom navigation menu – uses default wp3.0 menu function to manage page navigation and supports advanced drop down lists.
• UK town and County import - allows users to select address from dropdown lists during ad listing.
• Custom Google map display – removed sellers full address from maps.
• Fully integrated banner advertising management – end users can purchase ad space and manage account.
• Video placements – will allow for video user help guides.
• Custom sold and featured ribbons – on ad listings.
• Custom user photos on members profiles.
• Anti-spam verification – added recaptcha to email contact forms.
• Extra info on site emails – cleaned site notifications and included additional fields.
• Social sharing – new bookmark sharing
• Related posts – links to existing news to help seo
• Number of SEO changes.

These are just some of the features added to the site, I have still got a few to add like video upsell, save adds, reporting, mobile site and these hopefully will be added over the next few weeks.

Lastly before anyone asks how I achieved some of these custom features, most have been covered in these forums so please take a moment to read as there are lots of answers on board and these have helped me a great deal!

Any that are not covered on the forums have resulted in me hiring external developers of which has come to great cost to me to hire these guys in so sadly I will not be able to share these for free.

Of course if I find any topics on the forms where I got the information for free then I will update them as and when I find them as I have already done the last few days but please respect my commercial changes as these have not come easy to achieve, if you want custom work then then you need to pay for the talented developers time and in return you will be rewarded with a site that meets your goal.

I Look forward to any feedback you have and would like to say thank you to anyone who has answered my forum topics and helped me.

Some of these members: jomarkosabel, doctorcilantro, Fanatic, pepsi, scarstens, firestormcs, iamfabian, ahikmahin and many more...

And of course Ruben for his help with my theme

Thanks
Sam

It really looks professional though I find the blue color too strong but I guess it is just fitting for the colorful bouncy castle site.

Sam, THANKS a lot for this very kind words!

I tend to agree. . .but if customers like it, who's to argue?
The stripe generator that makes the background image allows for color control of the stripes - I would experiment with a little less contrast between the stripes. . .make them more of a "background" and less obtrusive. (my personal opinion)
Also, I would try a "fade" on the background. . .probably reduce it's opacity to about 80-percent and layer it on top of a matching blue, faded blue or white layer.

I find that anything that draws attention to itself, tends to pull attention away from the target information. (again, my pov)

Wow, have to agree with Jomark the blue and the orange are a strong color combination, but the rest of the design and layout is nicely done. Good luck!

Thanks for the messages, yes i agree the colours are strong but thats our market being inflatables they tend to be bright colours.

We still have a lot of work to complete so things might get toned down a bit, depends on the feedback we get at our up and coming trade stands