Last Minute Villas website launched

It was a month in making and a lot of time on the phone with U.K. native-turned-Florida-business man Stewart Granville... but the Last Minute Villas website finally launched in its new form on Friday, April 30, 2004.

Granville commissioned me for the redesign through a reference from Search Engine Optimizer David Leonhardt.

Last Minute Villas is a website that advertises villas in Florida.

Some of the new features I developed include many of the same database-driven features found on this site, as well as javascript integration. The most exciting feature, from my point of view, is the (server-side) database-driven (client-side) Javascript cascading drop-down menus that work in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator... and is search-engine friendly.

One of the challenges with the site was trying to find a work-around for the unintuitive habit of Internet Explorer that places SELECT menus above all other objects in a web page. This played havoc with the menu system. After trying to find a solution... I finally gave up and forced the select menus to disappear from the web page whenever a drop-down menu appears.

Added Note: The version linked from this page is an updated version using Flash, launched in 2008.