Pretty much ever since my brother Andrew and his fiancee Heather set a date for the wedding this summer Becky has been in full-on planning mode for the trip. It’ll be a bit of an adventure and all, taking the girls on their first airplane ride and going cross-country to Washington for a week. We’re going to make a week-long vacation out of it; we’ll have a few days with the family for the wedding, but we want to get out to see the ocean, too, and will try to take a day to see Seattle and hopefully Matt (my old college roommate) and his wife Abbie.

So when I say full-on planning mode, well, that doesn’t capture the half of it. Becky is a ridiculous crazy good planner. She first scoped out the airfares and after a few days settled on the best option of price, schedule, and dates. With that in place, she sketched out an itinerary for the 8 days of the trip - fly in, go to the ocean, then head up towards the wedding, then hit Seattle for a couple days on the way out. With that planned, she started researching places to stay near the ocean. If she could find true Oceanfront, she’d be thrilled. [There is a point to this story, just be patient.]

She found a place called the Oceanfront Lighthouse Resort that has some pretty nice “oceanfront” condos, at least as far as we could tell from the website. The website is pretty scary - obviously someone’s side project, just enough to make do. Then inspiration struck - why, I asked Becky, don’t I contact the resort and see if they’d like to trade a website overhaul for a couple nights' stay? A few emails later I had agreed to create a prototype so that they could make a decision. Half-a-dozen hours of weekend webdesign later I had a prototype complete and emailed off. (And Geof: thanks for allowing shell access. Makes it a ton easier to edit stuff live.)

Last night I talked on the phone with the manager of the resort for a while. The end result: we now have reservations for a complimentary two-night stay in an oceanfront condo. And I have probably another 5 or 6 hours of work to complete and setup the new website. Sure, if I were a professional designer I’d get a better hourly rate, but for a couple afternoons of design work, well, I’ll do the trade.

If I design too many more websites I need to think about setting up a design homepage to see if I can attract a little more business. After doing so many (worthy) freebies, these paying gigs are kinda fun!