MVC

Built in July 2009.

The client came to me first needed to move their web site since their existing host was going out of business.  They didn't want their site to be down for very long because they didn't want to lose their customers.

I asked if they have a copy of their site and they did and they sent it over.  I was surprised to find out the "site" was just a single page that was essentially their business card.

REQUIREMENTS

I saw an opportunity here and started asking questions.

• Did they want a real web site? One that had content about their business and pictures of their motel.  Response: yes
• How did they process reservations presently?  Response: Excel.  All the customers called for a reservation and they had to check for availability and then they gathered customer information.
• How did they process payments?  Response: manually with a credit card terminal in their office.  So now online credit card processing was needed.
• If I could build them a site that displays content for their motel and also takes reservations and maintains the records in a database, would they want that? Response: yes
• Do you have a budget for this?  Response: not much.  That usually tells me they don't have more then maybe a few hundred dollars.  But as this would be my first foray into the world of ASP.NET MVC in a production environment, I told them I could give them a break.

DESIGN

So I went about designing the application to be as simple as possible so it doesn't scare away my client from using it, while trying to give them the most complete application for their needs.

What I came up with was this, an application that contains the following features:

CMS

• a small CMS system to maintain their rooms page.  They can add or remove rooms from the site as needed.  Some of their rooms are not available since they are rented on a monthly basis.  But if they become available, they want to be able to offer them without my intervention.

Reservation System -

• Manage rooms
• manage room options
• manage room beds
• Manage Customers
• view previous bookings
• Manage Reservation requests
• View all requests
• Book new requests
• cancel requests if before arrival date
• manage room options on a per room basis
• automatically send confirmation email to customer
• display booked reservations on public page

        
This didn't seem all that hard, and it wasn't.  But I was treading in uncharted waters for much of this application.

When I was finished I created a bunch of small tutorial videos for my client on how to use the application using Jing (free screencast software).  This helped immensely and my client only had to contact me once with a question.

So all in all this turned out to be a very satisfying experience for me as well as my client.  They never dreamed that they would be able to get a web site like this for such little money.

And over the holidays they had a spike in rooms bookings over previous years because their customers liked being able to get so much information about their business from their web site.

Here are some of the technologies I used in this application:

• ASP.NET MVC v1.0
• jQuery
• MvcContrib
• custom jQuery apps
• SQL Server 2008
• Linq-to-Sql