Vrij & Blij Verhuur

The assignment was to build a website for a fictional company renting out holiday homes, taking things like budget and location into account. Beyond that it was deliberately broad: much of it was left to me.

That freedom is what made this project interesting. The booking system, the reviews, the links to other properties, the list of amenities, the FAQ, the reviews on the homepage and the things to do nearby were not part of the assignment — I added them because a rental site isn't finished without them.

A site for a rental company with five holiday homes across two locations. Visitors browse the properties and the surrounding area, make a booking, leave a review and get in touch.

Everything on the site comes from the database: the properties, the amenities, the reviews, the text. Nothing is hard-coded, so the offering can change without touching a single line of code.

The booking system — not building it, but thinking it through. How does booking actually work, what's included by default and what counts as an extra, and at what point does someone give up because you're asking too much or telling them too little. Those are decisions you never see on a finished site, but they decide whether it works.

Designing the database was a project in itself. I built it following the normalisation rules: working out what really needs storing, how to structure it, and making sure the same data isn't kept in two places. That's the difference between a database that grows with you and one you end up working around six months later.

And then it all had to work together — pages, bookings, reviews and amenities all drawing on that same database without getting in each other's way.

This project taught me to think a system through before starting to build, and to separate what matters from what doesn't. It's also the project where I made the step from static pages to pages built entirely from a database — the way I've built everything since.