We built Lit Studios' booking system from scratch and built it into their website: live availability, studio and kit in one request, and a calendar that stays in step with the owner's phone.
Page size measured on the live booking page, same computer, emulated 4G, cache off. Full method under "Measured". The test count is from the project's own test suite.
Customers see the whole month at a glance, with every day marked free, part booked or fully booked, and pick their dates straight from it.
Customers tap a first day and a last day, up to 31 days in a run, then choose a full day (8am to 6pm), a half day, custom hours or, on Mondays, by the hour. A guide price is worked out from the studio's own rates card, with VAT shown.
The request lands as pending. The owner confirms or declines from the admin area, and the customer gets an email either way. The system also handles two studios: booking both together blocks each one, and a booking in either blocks the pair. The Void is ready to switch on the day it joins.
46 real items across 8 categories, each with a photo and live stock for the dates chosen.
Availability is worked out from the stock held, less the most that is committed on any day in the range, so two customers can never hire the same light.
Kit can be added straight onto a studio booking, so one request covers everything. Confirm, decline, cancel and paid all carry through to the kit from a single action.
Everything the studio owner needs sits inside one admin area. There is no file editing and no technical step, ever.
The next seven days at a glance, with requests waiting for a decision.
Review, confirm or decline, with the right email sent to the customer automatically.
Close a single day, a run of days or both studios for a shoot or a holiday.
A read only month showing bookings, holds, kit hires and anything busy in the linked iCloud calendars, each tagged with where it came from.
Drop in a spreadsheet and review what is new and what would change, row by row, before anything is written.
Mark a booking paid by card terminal, transfer, link or cash, with a reference.
Email, calendar, studios and rates, the kit agreement and the passcode, each with a test button.
A checklist walks the owner through setup until every step is done.
A privacy notice and a hire agreement, both built into the booking forms.
About 5,000 lines of purpose built code, backed by 86 automated tests.
The website and the owner's phone are never out of step.
Confirmed bookings, holds and kit hires are written into the studio's own iCloud calendars, with stable IDs so they update in place and disappear again if a booking is cancelled.
It works the other way too. Anything the owner adds to those calendars by hand, such as a shoot arranged on the phone, takes that slot off the public booking page. A private read only feed lets the owner subscribe from any phone.
A privacy notice written to what the code really does, linked beside every request form. A hire agreement signed in the browser behind a mandatory tick box, with the version recorded on every booking so the studio always knows what a hirer agreed to.
A passcode protected admin, form protection, a lockout after repeated failed logins, and a production build that refuses to start without its secrets.
A health check, plus a monitor on the server every five minutes that sends an alert email if the site is ever down. If the app fails to start it shows a holding page with the studio's phone and email, and a deploy fails loudly unless the health check passes.
Book Now sits in the menu of every page of litstudios.ie.
The equipment page sends visitors straight to the live kit list, so what they see is always what is actually available.
The main studio site stays as it was. We built the booking system to sit alongside it, with the same look and the same menu, so a customer never feels they have left.
| Live page | Booking | Kit hire |
|---|---|---|
| Requests | 10 | 26 |
| Page weight | 54 KB | 361 KB |
| JavaScript | 3 KB | 2.5 KB |
| Stylesheets | 9.7 KB | 9.7 KB |
| Fully loaded | 1.3 s | 1.4 s |
Method: the live pages tested on the same computer in Chrome, cache off, with an emulated 4G connection (about 8 Mbps and 150 ms latency), median of three runs. The kit hire page is larger because it carries a photo for each item.
Today the owner records card terminal, transfer and cash payments against each booking. A payment link in the confirmation email is the natural next step.
Tell us how you take bookings today and we will show you what a bespoke system could do for your business.
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