You are here: Home / Archives for website design

Website for Fisher’s Tudor House

February 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

It may not look like it on the surface, but this was a huge project. The mandate was to take two very dated, very old school websites and bring them into 2012. There were so many pages and interior links that just sorting it out required a flow chart. The SEO was Jurassic but losing ranking in such a competitive market wasn’t an option. Top it all off with an eCommerce component and a former webmaster that didn’t want to be a team player. I even pulled in old friend Marc Fuller to tweak the SEO.

 

The shining light was a client I just love. He understood the challenges and listened to my advice. Now he is no longer held hostage and is amazed at how easily he can update the new site himself.

Fisher’s Tudor House 2012

Just so you can get some idea of where we started…

thanks Pete.

Filed Under: Announcement, Website Design, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Is E-commerce Something You Could Do?

January 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

I am seeing the twinkling of a trend among small independent wedding vendors. E-commerce is beginning to come into play more and more as either an additional service or product or a full on pure play. Monday I’ll start my third E-commerce site in the last 2 months.shopping carts and ecommerce for wedding vendors

How, you ask, are wedding vendors using Ecommerce? They are using it in a variety of ways. I’m not going to give away their ideas, but I can tell you that it runs the gambit from hand-crafted products, to personalized design services to gift cards.

This all ties into what I have been saying about really thinking about what makes you unique and how you can use that to enlarge both your offerings and your niche.

Capitalize on your reputation to expand your business.

Think about what you can pre-package, so to speak. Suppose I were still baking. Now my wedding cakes were all one of a kind designs and not something I could have sold on the internet, but my hand made truffles would have worked. For that matter, if I had really wanted to go for it, I could have sold just the designs, cake blue prints, if you like. Brides could have then taken them to their auntie or local baker to bake and decorate.  Do you see where I am going with this?

Put on your thinking cap and go for a walk outside the box. 

One of the amazing things about the internet, is that you can try these kinds of things out relatively cheaply. Put a page on your site with your products and a simple shopping cart for a small investment. If it works, then you can think about really investing in it. If it doesn’t, take down the page off your site and you are out a couple of hundred buck, tops.

Next week, I’m going to take you on a tour of what I think are a couple of the best sites to emulate to market both your current business and an eCommerce play.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Ask Christine, Blog, Building Your Business, Trends, Website Design, What's Hot Tagged With: , , ,

How to Handle a Bad Review

December 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

I don’t know if you have been following the recent string of articles over on eWedNewz concerning reviews on wedding websites. If not you can catch them here, here and here.eWedNewz logo

What started as a story regarding the sale by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia selling their interest in Wedding Wire grew to be an indictment of Wedding Wire and it’s review program. Whether you like Wedding Wire and it’s review program or not isn’t really important to my point. They are only one of many review programs out there and I happen to think Wedding Wire does a pretty reasonable job.

Here is the thing, you are not going to please everyone.

Yes that is what we all strive for, but it isn’t going to happen.  So on that rare occasion when someone is upset enough to take finger to keyboard and put it out there, how you react is of vital importance.

The first thing you want to do is step away from the keyboard. DO NOT post a response in the heat of the moment. Your feelings are hurt and you are probably angry. Give it a day or two to filter.

Then post one or two reasonable sentences. Something along the line of

“I am sorry that we did not meet your expectations. We are actively reaching out to you via private channels to help resolve these differences.”

Of course you will need to reach out to them, but the point of the post was to let anyone reading the bad review know that you stand behind your work.

What you don’t want to do is post some long, rambling explanation or string of excuses. That is just going to start a very public pissing contest and that is the last thing you want.

Be sure to contact the hosting website to have the review verified or moderated. Sometimes this works. Sometimes.

What if you have no idea who this bride is?

Yep it happens. What if a competitor that is sneaky, malevolent and underhanded lies and posts a bad review on your page?

First you will contact the hosting website to have it verified. That can take forever and they may not even take your side. In the meantime, you need to respond to the review.

“I am not finding any reference to such an incident in my records. Would the poster please poivide her wedding date and location so that I may attempt to resolve this issue.”

Now you have publicly called them out and the ball is in their court. If they continue without providing the information they look like fools. You have also done a lot to CYA.

The main thing you want to keep in mind is that today’s bride is savvy enough not to base her opinion on just one bad review in a long list of stellar ones. In fact in some ways, it makes the other ones look more real. If every single review is Amazing!! Stellar!!! Way beyond expectations!!!!! they start to look a little fake. You know, like those late night infomercials.

Come on now, you do that yourself when you read reviews.

If worse comes to worse and you just can’t take it or find a way to resolve it; contact the website and have yourself removed entirely from the site.

Since this whole bruhaha started with a Celebrity planner’s bad review on Wedding Wire, I reached out to Sonny Ganguly, CMO at WW to be sure you could have Wedding Wire rated badgeyour business removed. Here is his response:

In regards to your question, a wedding professional can inactivate their WeddingWire account by sending a request to our Support team at support@weddingwire.com. Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Ok, so that was kind of vague and didn’t really answer my question; so I followed up with this:

I need just one point of clarification please.

 Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Would you remove ALL information regarding said wedding pro? All traces of them, including reviews or would you leave a basic listing?
I still haven’t received an answer to that one yet, but I will post it to the comments when/if I do.
If nothing else comes out of this dust up and the press from it, I do believe that WW will be more closely watched with regard to the review process. To quote one of their, umm, associates “That’s a good thing!”

 
 
As I was writing this I saw this come through my Twitter stream

@idillionaire: If you’re not making enemies, you’re not doing well enough.

Filed Under: Announcement, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Hire a Photographer!

November 29, 2011 By 3 Comments

I hear it and see it all the time: wedding vendors that do fabulous work but have lame photos to show for it. They spent hours sweating over the perfect food display or those gorgeous tissue paper pom-poms hung perfectly from a tree or the centerpieces on top of the perfect linen. Then after the fact, often months after the fact, the wedding photographer, after much arm twisting and begging sends them a file of stunning prints of the B&G, the wedding bands and a picture of shoes! Wow, score!

Now whose fault is this? Well it damn sure isn’t the photographers. They were hired to shoot the B&G and the list they sent them, not your details. (unless they were on the brides list, that is)

Here is a tip: 

Hire your own photographer!

Then they are working off of your list. You should get the images in a timely fashion and have just the shots you want.

OK, here it comes…

I am about to get hit by photographers that forbid other shooters at their weddings. In this instance, get over it. These vendors are hiring their own professional so they get the marketing materials that they need and have every right to own. Besides, you obviously aren’t shooting what they need in a way that helps them. Your client is the bride. You need to find a way to work this out. I mean come on, 9 times out of 10 this outside shooter will be done before the guests arrive and you won’t ever see them.

But WAIT! There’s more!

Hey you photographers just starting out…

I am always asked how you can break-in with the top designers and planners. How about you start hitting them up to shoot their details? Do a good job over a period of time and they may just add you to their roster.

In my outsider, twisted opinion that is a win for everybody.

  • The vendors get exactly what they need.
  • The wedding photographer doesn’t have to worry about shooting for the vendors.
  • The new photographer gets some real world experience and some new contacts.
What’s not to love?
Oh, and I get great images to work with when marketing my clients.
Filed Under: Ask Christine, Back to Basics, Building Your Business, Marketing, Outrageous Marketing, Website Design Tagged With: , , , ,

Two New Websites. A Caterer and a Bridal Salon

October 13, 2011 By 3 Comments

I’ve been busy busy in the pixel mines of late. Good thing the treehouse has direct access to their deepest darkest recesses!

First up is a new client  Mrs J’s Baking and Catering that was, of course, a referral from another happy friend of Think. Celeste Morris, the owner, was living with a site she hated and had very little control over. Oh, she could add some content but not much and had little or no control over the look or the galleries. Well now you know I was going to fix that nonsense!

Her site looked generic with no real branding to match what she did. You see, unlike a lot of caterers, Celeste specializes in southern style comfort food. Not much except the menus reflected that. So here at Think we fixed her right up with a new logo and new branding to go with her shiny new site.  An hour or two of my standard tutorials and she was able to update anything she wanted.  She has started to blog and this fall we have her signed up for Ashley’s Blog Camp! 

Tale a look. (I just love her background) The image is a link to her site.

Mrs J's Baking & Catering website

Next up was a redo for a site I originally built back in 2009. Sarah Morris, The Something Blue Shoppe in Hartselle, AL still loved her site but she came back from Bridal market full of ideas and energy. Well you know how we women are, fill us with ideas and energy and the first thing we do is redecorate!  It was time for an update anyway so off we went. I added a few features and made the look a little sleeker.

 Let me know what you think.

The Something Blue Shop website

Sarah’s other store Something Blue Too’s website is slated for the same treatment as soon as I get finished with the 3 wedding planners sites I am working on now. We have to get it ready for prom!

Filed Under: Announcement, Blog, Inspiration, Website Design, Website marketing Tagged With:

Don’t You Wish This Was Your Google Analytics

August 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Last week I posted about a website I had updated for a client, Picture This Nashville.

Well today I got this in an email from Elaine, the sites owner.

Wouldn’t you love results like this for your website?

Just  sayin’

 

Filed Under: Blog, Website marketing Tagged With: , , ,

The Picture of A Great Website

August 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

I loved the phone call I got on Wednesday.

I had a site go live for a client, PictureThisNashville.net, on Monday. On Wednesday Elaine, the owner, called to tell me she had booked a wedding from the site and for the first time the client said they had found her on Google.  That 3 days to go from not showing up on Google at all to showing up on the front page. Not bad if I do say so myself.

Here is what Elaine had to say

Where do we begin to thank you. Christine you are amazing and we are so glad we met you.  I will never forget our first meeting I knew right then and there you were the person to help us get our business heading in the right direction. Since you redid and relaunched our website we have had a 42% jump in viewers and we booked a wedding from someone that found us on a google search which I know you helped with.

Thank you so much. You ROCK!!

Elaine Pardo – Ingram
PICTURE THIS NASHVILLE
www.picturethisnashville.net

Have a look for yourself. (the image is a live link)

By the way, Elaine’s concept for a completely new type of Photo booth is killer. Please check it out, especially if you at all techie. It’s worth a look just for the Touch Screen iMac’s. They are so fun to play with!

Filed Under: Announcement, Website Design Tagged With: , , ,

Websites to Sing About! How’s Yours?

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I have been a busy, busy bee. Lot’s of my client sites were in need of an update, but I still found time to build a few new ones.

First up, A Song for Her. Gil Grand and his PR agent Melissa Mathews first approached me with their idea in the spring and it was a great one. Gil is an award winning singer songwriter and now you can have him write a custom song for you. Need to say “I love you” or “Dang, I screwed up” or “I miss you?” Then Gil’s you guy.

Now I will be the first one to admit that I know virtually nothing about music or the music industry ( ya, ya I know I live in NashVegas) but by listening to what they wanted and what they did, I was able to identify their target audience and give them what they needed. Have a look

To make a long story short, Gil and Melissa were so happy that when Gil’s company, Grand & Gee were nominated for CCMA Music Publisher of the Year they called me to do their ad! We wish Grand & Gee all the luck in the world, they deserve it.

Filed Under: Announcement, Marketing, Website Design, Website marketing Tagged With: ,

New Websites

May 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

I know I have been MIA alot lately. Well, I’ve been deep in the pixel mines creating sites for 3(4 sort of) of the most wonderful clients ever.

First up, are the wild and wacky Koko Brothers, an entertainment firm out of Baltimore. I loved working with Lou and Angelo, they cracked me up every time we spoke. If you are in the Baltimore area, or anywhere else in the world for that matter and want to have a lot of fun at your event, give them a call.

Next was a site redesign for dear friend of Think, Vicki Sanders at Branching Out Event Florist. I had built her last site but she’s been taking my advice about re-inventing. She is expanding into vintage rental and needed an update to reflect that. We still have to polish up the floors in her portfolio, but that can wait until she gets past the unbelievably busy May she has. You go Girl!

 

Then of course, there was the site for eWedNewz. That one went up in 24 hours because it had to.

Filed Under: Blog, Website marketing Tagged With: , ,

The Power of WordPress

February 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you are still using a Flash website or something like Website Tonight, you may want to take a look at this infographic from TechKing.

Isn’t it time to switch to WordPress?

While you are at it, add a premium theme from StudioPress. Yes, I am a Studiopress afiliate but that is because I use it and believe in it and the power of WordPress.

I’m not alone. Such entities as The New York Times, CNN and Fox News use WordPress to power their blogs. So does the NFL. In September 2010, Microsoft replaced Windows Live Spaces with WordPress. Do they know something you don’t?

Infographic: The Power of WordPress

The Power of WordPress by Tech King

Filed Under: Website marketing, What's Hot Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts