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The lovely people at Rainbow Weddings are without a doubt one of my favourite clients to work with. They are a small family-owned wedding and events co-ordinator – over the years growing their skill-set to include balloons, table decoration, planning and floral decoration. More recently they have also branched into hiring and selling key wedding items. Over the course of 3 months, with one re-design, we were able to triple their monthly enquiries, find out how…

Why Re-Design?

The old site had been up for a few years, and whilst it had been successful – the company had grown and moved on and there were several areas where the site fell short.

Design
The design was focused very much on the tastes of the company manager. The palette was quite neutral and used lots of sepia. This was in contrast to the styles of weddings they were doing for their young brides and grooms. We needed something more vibrant and modern.

Management
The team were unable to manage the site themselves, meaning sometimes the information was out of date, making the site seem stagnant.

Wrong Focus
The old site was too focused on planning, which was rapidly becoming a smaller part of the business. The main area for growth had been in their hire catalogue – which was buried within the site and missing most of the range.

New Design

The new design was much brighter – moving away from cream and instead using white for a clean sharp look. The company’s brand colour was purple, so we kept this within the design. We also put much more focus on photography – with a large banner rotating through their various services and showcasing their work.

Content Management

In many ways the biggest change to the site was in the back-end infrastructure. Whereas before the site was flat and hard to manage, it was now converted in to a data-driven site, powered by WordPress.

We spent a lot of time making the back-end as easy to manage as possible, as the client was concerned about whether they would actually be able to make changes without my help. To make it easy, we separated out hire items, blog posts, pages, testimonials and galleries into separate sections – rather than using custom fields to define the type. I also added a number of unique short codes to help with the general editing of pages.

The result is that the team are no longer concerned about breaking the site and can easily add and amend content, preventing the website from ever appearing stagnant and out-dated.

Bottom Line

The best bit about making all these changes is seeing how it affects the behaviour of visitors and ultimately the company.

The first change, which was almost immediate, was that bounce rate halved – this the number of people who leave the site within 3 seconds of getting there. So obviously the new design appealed more to the target audience.

We also saw a significant increase in both page views and time on site. So customers were actually spending longer on the site, ready more about the services and looking at the gallery etc.

The biggest change though has to be in the volume of traffic to the site. Google likes sites with frequently updated content, rewarding them with higher search rankings. So within 3 months of going live, organic traffic quadrupled. In fact, that change combined with the facebook campaign the company began running – we saw overall traffic to the site triple month-on-month.

The company is now getting significantly more enquiries through the website and I believe that this summer, Rainbow Weddings are fully-booked up and the hire side of their company is booming.