City House Rentals

I created the City House Rental’s website in the summer of 2008. The purpose of City House Rentals is to display a rental homes in the Washington DC suburbs, specifically Bethesda and Chevy Chase Maryland. I designed the layout from scratch in Adobe Photoshop and used WordPress to display the rental listings and content. After exporting the layout PSD from Photoshop, I coded it in XHTML and CSS.

The next step was installing WordPress and configuring it to communicate with the MySQL database. After that I customized my layout to fit in with the WordPress theme system. From there I installed and customized a real estate plugin and entered the property listing information along with photos of the houses and floorplans. I programmed a custom contact form that emails listing information to site visitors that have requested more rental info.

Finally, I installed a blog for City House Rentals employees to write articles about Maryland and Washington DC real estate and rental home related news. With WordPress and my custom plugins, City House Rentals administrators are able to manage rental listings and site content to this day without any technical experience. The usability of WordPress (powered by PHP and backed with MySQL) continues to amaze me and this project really shows the scripts flexibility. Today, I update and maintain the City House Rentals website from time to time making layout changes, doing search engine optimization tasks, and installing Google Adsense scripts.

Project Screenshots

The City House Rentals homepage shows a few featured rental listings that are managed through the custom admin panel. Users can fill out a form that will automatically notify them when new listings are added to our MySQL database.

The listings page simply reads all the rental listings from a MySQL database and prints them out nicely on the screen. Users can sort listings be location, availability, price, etc.

This is the City House Rentals blog which lets users browse a variety of home rental related articles. The blog is powered by PHP and MySQL and is conveniently managed through a customized administration panel.

This is another screen shot of the City House Rentals Wordpress blog. Each article has it's own page where users can comment and view other comments.

The administration panel home page has links to edit the blog, manage rental listings, configure site settings, and much more. It also shows statistics such as the number of unique visitors, total number of comments, etc.

This is the listing manager. Administrators can add, edit, and delete listings.

Listings can be changed with a WYSIWYG editor or just through the source code on this page. Administrators can add a description to listings as well as upload house photos and floor plans.

Another screenshot of the rental listing editor, administrators can change property information here such as price, address, and data available. Features like big backyard, washer/dryer, cable TV, and pool can be added to the listing.