Aster House — a small hotel
A hotel has two kinds of visitor and they want opposite things. One is checking a date. The other is deciding whether the place is any good.
Aster House puts the date check in the furniture — persistent, always to hand — and spends the page itself on the rooms, which are CMS entries linked to bookable room types with real availability. Stay offers are entries too, so a winter rate is a piece of content rather than a code change.
It runs dark everywhere except the pages where somebody types their name in, which are light on purpose.
Every one of these was somebody’s Tuesday afternoon.
Twelve starting pointsYou are copying a site, not a wireframe.
Whichever one you pick, it lands in your account with its pages, its brand tokens, its content and every module the design depends on already configured. Nothing is shared with the original — change the prices on day one and no other site moves.
Three more, chosen by nobody.
The index is generated from the same twelve entries, so it is never out of date and nobody has to remember to update it.
Nightjar — a box office
Coalhouse — a band
Grainline — sell a file
Change the words.
Keep the machinery.
Or start from an empty page and build it yourself — by hand, or by describing it to an agent.