We were approached by Tony Booth of Florida Owner Rentals to completely redesign their site with a view to increasing the functionality for visitors, villa owners and equally important, the company staff.

The current site gives people the ability to search for their ideal holiday villas in a range of localities and with a host of features. Need a pool? No problem! Heated? How, gas, electric or solar?

Using a completely bespoke product configuration system, Florida Villas can be configured with an unlimited amount of features and a host of options simply unavailable in off the shelf shopping products.

Most e-commerce websites have some sort of administration panel that enables the site owner to change content, alter news, change products and view orders, however that's usually where it stops. Very often the day-to-day running of the company is a separate function handled by separate software, but Tony needed more than that, he needed to manage the booking of villas directly through the site, monitor orders as they came in and also have complete control over offers, prices and how products are displayed.

Villa owners are an extremely important part of the process, without them the website would have no offering, so the site allows owners to update their own details and manage their villas themselves.

Of course, it's not just villas. The web site also offers the ability to book car hire, insurance and attraction tickets. Each type of product required a unique method of handling costing and payment as each required configuration options that just aren't available in normal shopping cart solutions.

Due to the nature of the varying purchasing options within the site, we wrote a bespoke shopping application from scratch. There was no existing software package available that could cope with the varying product types, price configurations and options needed to offer customers an all-in-one holiday buying experience.