7 Items Every Wedding Professional's Website Should Have

A Gallery of Images
People like to research weddings online because they can see images and gain ideas. Don’t disappoint. Your gallery should show more than a dozen images. Let them spend hours on your site! At our high point, we had over 20,000 images online. And many people would spend hours going through every single one of them.

Contact Information
I spend a lot of time on other peoples’ sites. And I find a lot of business owners are so worried about spam, they leave off contact information in their fears. Guess what? People can’t contact you if they don’t know how. Fill out forms are great, and are the first step for contact. Give a phone number – some people prefer to call. Give an address – your prospects would love to know what city your in, and where your studio is. Give an email – you can make it a non-clickable graphic.

Content
A portfolio isn’t enough. It’s nice looking at a dozen images, but who are you? What’s your style? How did you decide to become a wedding professional? What’s the story behind your business? In person, you build a relationship with your prospect. The same thing has to occur online. Content is what sells your business.

Sales Techniques
Your website is more than a portfolio; it’s a sales tool. Think of how you sell in person, and use those same features online. Your website should be growing and changing all the time.

Proper Navigation
If you’ve ever been “stuck” in a website, you know navigation is so important. If you move to a page, it better be easy to move around and back out. Think like your customer. If that’s hard to do, bring a customer in and ask them what they think.

Ordering System
Shopping carts have made it easy to order online. Whether you just take orders after you've communicated with the bride and groom, or offer a variety of things online to purchase at low prices, don't forget to make the entire process easy.  

Marketing
Your website is more than a portfolio; it’s a marketing tool. With over 6 billion web pages online, how will yours compete with the others? It takes marketing. Just like you wouldn’t sit at home without doing any marketing waiting for the phone to ring, you can’t sit at home without marketing your website waiting for the contacts. You have to use online marketing techniques to get noticed.