SunStar Bed and Breakfasts
Design, logo, 960 grid, html5, css3, jquery
Site | Wireframes | Mockup
Last summer, when I was looking at Bed and Breakfast sites for a quick get-away, I was surprised at how old-school and amateurish most of them were. So I came up with the idea of designing a hypothetical bed and breakfast site with a contemporary and professional feel, mainly to showcase some new photoshop techniques.
The idea of a bright, sunny site for a hypothetical suite of Bed and Breakfasts in New Mexico immediately popped into my head (probably because I was longing for warmth and sunshine after a dreary Seattle winter.)
I had a lot of fun designing this site using bright colors, gradients, and rays, which create a warm, welcoming feel. I wanted to focus mainly on the design so this site is only partially functional in terms of development. It does include a jQuery slideshow and reservation date picker. A twilight desert background provides an added dimension.
I was very pleased with how the colors and gradients turned out, particularly the sun logo, the promotional section for seasonal and package events, and the Twitter bubble at the bottom of the page. It is a bit image intensive, so if I were to design a site like this for real I would tend toward using more background images and CSS3 to achieve the same effects using less bandwidth.
For the final site, I modified the background container color to have a more sunny yellow look and added a background photo, which gives the site a more sophisticated look.