THE BRIDAL GALLERY
The Bridal Gallery
The Lvl-7 team has recently been busy at work on a new project, designing and launching a client's website for their new bridal brand. We are excited to share the result of all our diligent hard work with you.
The Bridal Gallery is a new business that offers brides-to-be a collection of exquisite wedding dresses by established, trailblazing designers to browse and try on so that they may find the perfect gown for their big day. To match such a sophisticated brand, the site needed to appear equally as elegant. Visiting the site would likely be the customer's all-important first step in their journey to finding their dream dress, a special garment they will surely cherish forever, so we wanted to deliver a stylish website that would engage them and aid their search.
Creating an online presence.
When establishing a new brand's online presence, we know how crucial it is for the website to create a striking impression. From the first team meeting, our developers envisioned a site that would be the perfect online extension of the physical store, confidently introducing The Bridal Gallery to users by capturing its unique heart and soul. Every decision we made had to reflect the brand guidelines, so, as always, we kept in close contact with our client throughout the entire process and were always on hand, 24/7, to answer their questions and make sure we were heading in their desired direction.
A large part of our work for The Bridal Gallery revolved around building up its SEO value. The Lvl-7 team will always build a new site to conform to SEO best practices, and this case was no exception. To start with, our SEO specialists undertook a search insight report to identify which keywords to optimise for. Once we knew what our target demographic was searching for, we could devise a keyword strategy. Smartly implementing this keyword strategy would be key to helping The Bridal Gallery climb the results pages. We used it to inform our decisions on what pages to include on the site and what information they should contain. In accordance with SEO naming conventions, we labelled site files, page titles, and URLs with the relevant keywords so that everything was fully optimised.
Building a valued site.
When designing the look of The Bridal Gallery, we needed to keep every page visually harmonious with the brand. So, we used the simple, stylish colour palette and fonts (specified in the brand guidelines) in a sleek, contemporary layout that would feel innate to users. The soft, understated brand colours draw visitors' attention to the vibrant images in the top banner that introduce each dress designer's collection.
As for the collection pages themselves, we chose to use a gallery view to showcase all the beautiful dresses. Our client provided us with a selection of wonderful photos, which we then edited, subtly altering the contrast, brightness, and colour levels to further emphasise each dress's character. We also had to crop some of the images so that they would fit into the site's features, such as the sliding banner.
User experience.
Delivering a seamless user experience is imperative for any business hoping to boost SEO and turn visitors into customers, which is why we have built The Bridal Gallery website to be as user-friendly as possible. The site's structure is very clear and in line with what a customer would expect from a bridal shop, with an FAQ section, an About page, and a section offering short bios of the dress designers. The top-level navigation makes it easy for visitors to find their way around, and the home page is divided into well-defined sections with CTA buttons that will bring visitors to key pages. The clear structure and page hierarchy also mean that search engine bots will likely favour the pages in the result rankings.
A sound internal linking structure—i.e. links in the domain that lead to other pages in the same domain—is also crucial to effective site architecture, enhancing the overall UX. Therefore, we made sure that, wherever we could, we had hyperlinked the keyword text to the relevant page. In short, The Bridal Gallery is built so that all the essential information is neatly structured and easy to locate, and users will have nothing but a pleasant experience when browsing the site, flowing from one page to the next.
Booking an appointment.
We also needed to make it enticingly easy for visitors to book an appointment once they have finished browsing. That's why we designed an integrated booking system, where brides-to-be can answer a questionnaire to tell The Bridal Gallery a little bit more about themselves and begin a personalised journey. An integrated booking system is essential for businesses that operate on an appointment-only basis, and we are happy to create a fully functional system as part of our services to e-commerce websites. The booking system allows customers to select a time from an automated calendar, which updates itself with available dates, and saves our client time and money that would have otherwise been spent on booking appointments and taking customers' details manually over the phone. The system also means that customers can make appointments at any time, not just within the shop's operating hours.
Of course, we didn't plan The Bridal Gallery's features and layout with only one screen size in mind. If a business wants to compete for today's internet traffic, it must work flawlessly on screens of all shapes and sizes. By coding the website to accommodate different resolutions, our UX designers have ensured that the site is fully responsive and adapts to desktop, mobile, laptop, and tablet displays..
Digital Marketing.
With the site built, we needed the means of assessing the efficacy of our work. After all, having the correct analytical tools is always necessary for the running of any website so that further improvements can be made where necessary. We have set up accounts on Google Analytics, which tracks, among other things, the volume of traffic and its source; Google Search Console, which provides tools to improve visibility on SERPs; and Google MyBusiness, which allows us to set up and manage a Google Business Profile that appears on SERPs and Google Maps. We linked all of these accounts to The Bridal Gallery so that we can monitor its performance on an ongoing basis.
Another important task facing our SEO experts was the creation of a sitemap. A sitemap contains all the pages of a site and shows how they are all linked. Once uploaded to Google Search Console, the sitemap allows the search engine bots to learn the structure of the site and index its pages so that they can rank them on the SERPs.
You can rely on us.
We are pleased to report that the launch of The Bridal Gallery website has been successful, and both the team and the client are thrilled with the outcome of our dedicated efforts. The Lvl-7 team can't wait for the next challenge, so if you have a website you want to create (or perhaps bring an outdated one into the modern era) but lack the time and expertise to make it yourself, contact Lvl-7 today. We will be more than happy to help.
We love creating innovative digital products for a whole range of clients from various industries, so if you would like to reinvent your digital presence, no matter what market you're in, get in touch with Lvl-7 today.