Available and unavailable dates aren’t displayed on the date picker. Leaving you to guess about availability

Recently I was playing around with Airbnb.com to check out some of their unique properties. As I tried to set some dates to get a sense of the price per night I started getting frustrated by their Book It! form. Every date I selected would result in a “Those dates are not available” error beneath the date picker. Each time, the flashing error would get me more irritated. After five or six tries, I couldn’t help but think “Why aren’t you guys showing me what dates are available in the date picker?”. The form also kept selecting a stay of 30 days from the departure date. An odd choice to me when in Canada and the US the average amount of time off is around two weeks. I was left wondering if the default was trying to book over days that were already taken.

Wanting to get a clear picture of what days were booked, I selected their booking calendar. Here booked days are marked in red, available in green. Simple and easy to understand. Using the booking calendar as a reference I navigated the date picker and tried to select an available period of time. I quickly noticed a disconnect as I tried to select the end of the week in the date picker. The booking calendar showed the sixth as the end of the week, while the date picker ended it’s week on the seventh. After a moment of confusion I realized that one calendar started it’s weeks on Sunday, while the other began the week on Monday. A subtle difference that threw me until I discovered the difference between both calendars.

Two different calendars with differing first day’s of the week. A problem if you want to leave at the end of the week and use the availability calendar as a guide of what to select on the right

The inconsistencies and lack of information in the form took a simple attempt at getting a price for a short stay into a much more complex adventure. Keeping a user interface consistent across a site can be a challenge, and small details like this are easily lost as you build a site.

We implemented a completely customized theme on a WordPress backend. The theme is also fully responsive, so out of the box, Cabinet of Curiosities is mobile-friendly. Not something you usually see in antique store sites. Today, with the ever increasing levels of mobile and tablet adoption, a mobile friendly site is rapidly becoming a requirement, not just an option. Responsive design can prove to be quite a challenge as you need to accommodate multiple screen widths. In our case, the site supports 6 differing sizes; Smartphones (portrait & landscape), Tablets (portrait & landscape), PC, and Widescreen PC.

The site also has a deep level of social media integration. Trying to promote your content across the social ecosystem can be a time consuming task. You update your site, then head off to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on to share that content with each of those accounts. It can be a full time job simply keeping all these up to date. We’ve completely automated this task for Cabinet of Curiosities. Whenever a new product or blog post is added to the site, relevant Twitter & Facebook posts are automatically created and posted to their Twitter stream and Facebook page. Auto posting to Pinterest will also be coming online soon. This frees up Cabinet of Curiosities to actually communicate with potential customers instead of keeping their streams up to date.

We’ve also optimized the bejeezus out of this site, earning an impressive 95 out of 100 Google PageSpeed score!

Take a look at the antiques and give us a shout if you’re looking to update your web presence.