A website for Rhydd Barn holiday let near Malvern, Worcestershire, UK.

Our contact details (telephone number and address for booking enquiries) are available in the downloadable Brochure—click the Rhydd Barn Brochure link in the sidebar. Our email address is info[at]rhyddbarn[dot]co[dot]uk.

The official postal address of Rhydd Barn is: Rhydd Farm Barn, The Rhydd, Hanley Castle, Worcester, WR8 0AG. PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS ADDRESS FOR BOOKING ENQUIRIES! Use the address in our downloadable Brochure.

Technical

This website is powered by WordPress (free software: open source/GPL), primarily a weblog tool but with basic CMS functions.

As well as the onboard Akismet spam blocking plugin, we have installed an extra security plugin: Login LockDown.

We have used a modified Shades of Blue theme (a two-column widget-enabled theme which had some of the elements we were looking for). We decided to forgo the built-in drop-down navigation in favour of simple tabs with relevant sub-page tabs displaying when appropriate (not that there are no subpages, yet). We have gone for a rounded box style, but only for the top of the boxes. This will be the style theme throughout (echoing the arch window in the barn through which the Malvern Hills can be seen? – funny I only just realized that as I was typing this!).

We are also using the following plugins to add some necessary functions:

• Events Calendar for managing and displaying our bookings calendar
• NextGEN Gallery for uploading pictures and managing the picture gallery admin and thumbnail display
• Highslide JS for viewing full size pictures and running them as a slide show
• Yoast Breadcrumbs to display a ‘breadcrumb’ navigation line
• WP-Print to enable printable versions of single news posts
• UMapper to create and display interactive maps
• WP-Table Reloaded to create and display tabels such as our booking tariff table
• WP ServerInfo for our own internal use to display some key settings of our web hosting providers
• Let It Snow! – a bit of seasonal fun – it’s snowing!!!

The site is hosted by Easily on its Linux Hosting service.

Mini-icons used on our website are courtesy of Pinvoke Diagona Icons (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license).

We use the following software locally:

• FileZilla Client (free software: open source/GPL) to upload files to our hosting providers.
• Notepad++ text editor (free software: open source/GPL) to edit the php, javascript and css files (where necessary) in WordPress and its plugins.
• WampServer2 (free software: open source/GPL) to ‘host’ this site locally and try out any changes or upgrades before committing them to the web hosted site.
• PDF Creator (free software: open source/GPL) to produce our downloadable Brochure, Booking Form and Access Statement (links in sidebar). Note that if you have Microsoft Office 2007 you can download a free PDF converter add-in.