THE BOOK OF BEAUTIFUL WEDDINGS
Showcasing the best of Central Texas
Recruited and asked to produce a new website for the Book of Beautiful Weddings magazine. With 50+ weddings vendors needing to be showcased on this website as well as showcasing previous magazine editions and contact pages, I needed to create a well architected site. By brainstorming with the client, researching existing wedding magazine websites that had vendor-like architecture and learning Wix.com datasources and coding, I was able to launch an intuitive website and continue to be the manager for any updates.
CONTEXT
Website Redesign
TIMELINE
Spring 2019
TOOLS
Adobe Illustrator
Wix.com
Wix Data
CONTRIBUTION
Consulting
Creative Brainstorm
Research
Information Architecture
UX / UI
Defining the Problem
Katelyn had inherited The Book of Beautiful Weddings magazine and knew that the website needed some work. Local wedding vendors were paying for advertising spots in both physical magazine and the website. We needed quick and easy ways to update a list of 50+ wedding vendors, but also ensure they each didn't lose their voice or brand with just generic listing pages. The ideal scenario would allow any website visitors, be it bride or groom, view our vendors and visit their website for more information.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Katelyn needed a new website to help showcase her growing list of central Texas wedding vendors. We will know this to be true when we see can easily update a running list of vendors and users are discovery our wedding vendors on our site.
Creative Brainstorming & Inspiration
The branding guidelines for The Book of Beautiful Weddings was already established for Katelyn as she inherited this magazine. With the design system already in place, we really had to focus in on the technical side of the website; how to easily create individual pages for 50+ wedding vendors. We researched other sites like Dmagazine.com and saw they had templated pages for their vendors that detailed name, number, social, images and more. I'm no coder, but I knew there had to be some kinda of solution. Luckily, with some research we found our solution through Wix Data, allowing us to manage data collections, build queries and then register hooks to operate those 50+ vendor pages! Hallelujah!
Information Architecture
Our biggest goal was accounting for our vendor pages, but we also knew we needed to have a blog, about page, where to find magazine issues and how to get in contact.
Vendor Page Wireframe
Our goal was creating a vendor page that would be easily replicated and filled. These pages needed to feature great photos of their work, their location in Central Texas, category, phone number, social media handles, a brief greeting and description and lastly a call-to-action that would get a user to visit their website.
Style Guide
Key Functions
RESPONSIVE VENDOR PAGE
What did I learn?
DATA COLLECTIONS ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND
No one wants to sit there duplicating the same page over and over again. I knew there had to be a solution for 50+ wedding vendor pages and I found it through data collections, a little bit of coding and "Voila!" we had lift off of 50+ wedding vendor pages powering off of one easy spreadsheet.
A NAMING CONVENTION IS KEY FOR ORGANIZING CONTENT
Working with 50+ different wedding vendors, I knew I had to keep a clean filing system for all the content they were emailing over to me. Having a templated approach I knew I need name, phone number, email address, social media handles and at least 5 photos per vendor.
HAND OFF AN EASY-TO-USE WEBSITE TO YOUR CLIENT
I not only wanted to build a website that was functional and achieved the goal of powering 50+ wedding vendor pages, but I also wanted to be sure that it was easy to update. The intuitive structure of Wix's website builder and data collections made it easy to provide instructions and educate my client so they could make updates on their own.
