With every client website strategy + design, I strive to ensure it’s as unique as the business itself. Everyone has a different reason for the business, and even if the goal is similar (ex: buying product, book free consultation), the individual competitive advantage or “why this business” is unique to each brand. I make that the center of my strategy + design.

This helps the business stand out & attract the right clients from the beginning.

I met Nadia, owner of Euphoria Events, back in 2019 when I was on the lookout for a wedding planner for my (originally in May 2020) wedding. One of the first things I noticed about her was her passion for wedding planning & wanting to help brides on their big day. She recognized that each bride is different and used that to help plan the couple’s big day. When she mentioned that she would need help with marketing & her website, I was excited to be a part of the process to help her sign on more brides!

After Euphoria Events went through its new re-branding, Nadia and I got in contact and started the process of creating an online presence that spoke to her target market!

Step 1: Research

The first step was to jump on a call and have a lengthy conversation so I can truly understand the business, her passion behind it, & what the goal of the website was. There were a few key pieces of information that stuck out from our call:

Re-iterating the idea of her understanding that each bride is unique
Goal of website: have them contact Euphoria for a free consultation

On that call, we discussed her customer journey to understand where her customers were coming from. The way information is presented on the homepage is dependent on this.

Ex: Most of the traffic comes in from referrals - you don’t need to have the “About” or even “Services” section near the top. What’s more important is testimonials, because they have heard who you are & what you do, what they want to see is if everyone else feels as positively as the person who referred them.

I then took another look at the old site (pics below), and loved the newly branded colors. As you can see, the website is heavy with the teal tones, which I heard through the call that Nadia wanted to incorporate as her main business is in wedding planning, so this was something I wanted to pull into the new design in a cleaner way.

Step 2: Ideation

Using my notes from our call, I started to create the wireframe of pages that would help achieve the main goal: get people to sign up for a free consultation call.

Keeping that goal in mind, the first big change to the website was to draw attention to this by placing a large button in the navigation (most websites tend to have the words “contact us”, but I have found that if it can be avoided, most people will avoid filling out forms just to inquire. Telling them that filling out the form gives them a free consultation so they talk to the wedding planner right away to see if they’re a good fit is a great way to ease the friction & get more people to sign up.

Next came the order of content on her homepage. Since most of her traffic comes from social media or referrals, they already know who Euphoria Events is. With this in mind, I placed links to the 2 main service categories right under the banner, and then put testimonials right after. These are two key pieces of content that individuals want to see. Then last came the About section, because it was not that important in this case as people were not coming in through search engines where they don’t have previous information on who the team is.

Step 3: Build

Now came the last step, designing! On the initial call with Nadia, we determined that using Squarespace 7.1 was the best option (the main feature missing is the “gallery” feature which in 7.1 is only available in blog / product pages), & since Euphoria is a wedding planning company, images were not the central focus of the website.

Because I had a wireframe built, I went in & started by just creating the needed blank pages, & adding in font and colors per her branding.

Some key design decisions made:

The call to action button in the navigation is her branded color to stand out against the white background. It also changes color when you hover over it - this was done to draw attention to it when people are browsing.
For the services section, I knew that I wanted to draw attention to this section using color & not leaving it as the white background with buttons. I created these custom graphics with her leaf logo so that it is branded. Since she did want a “heavier” website in terms of color (and not light and airy), this was a good way to adding branded colors without making a page look messy.
Because testimonials is key content that people want to see, this section was added on a teal background to draw attention. Similar to this, the main call to action at the bottom of the page uses the color contrast of a teal background with a peach button to draw the eyes, along with the words “once-in-a-lifetime event” to showcase the idea that Euphoria Events understands & treats each event as unique to the people they are planning for.

Final website design below: