New Website: Lindy Cooke Celebrant

A new site out for a new local business – love those!

Lindy Cooke, Celebrant needed a range of materials, including her first website, business cards, and a DL flyer. She had already established her Facebook page, is in the process of setting up LinkedIn, and just waiting for the final steps in the process of Google Places! In short, a branding and marketing process as well as website creation.

A simple, elegant, professional design was needed. Lindy had some beautiful images, taken professionally, and these are used consistently. The use of professional photography really does make for a better end product but this is often something ignored by businesses – it’s just not OK to just use whatever you can find in a Google search and the cost of photography, depending on what images you need, should always be viewed as an investment!

Because the site is quite small – around 5 pages – optimisation for search findability is key! Lindy offers a wonderful range of ceremonies and services – have you ever heard of a Sand Ceremony, or a Singing/Prayer Bowl Ceremony? I hadn’t! And that led to a discussion about the possibility of blogging – still up for discussion, but I think it would be a great addition to the core site, and will provide some fresh and unique content.

It’s been a total pleasure working with Lindy on this project – not only is she incredibly organised, but she had a plan! It’s rare for a client to be so clear about what’s needed, the vision for how it should look, have content written, and images ready to go! For the business cards and DL, much of the design had been drafted and it was fine tuning, and Photoshop for artwork! For the website however, Lindy was very open to suggestion about how it should look, and the end result is beautiful, and right on brief.

Business cards complement the website, and the DL flyer is at the printers!

Before getting to designing the website, I worked with Lindy to organise her domain name, and hosting. I think it is so important for clients to ‘own’ these – I’ve had too many new clients this year with awful stories about how they’ve lost control of their website, and in some cases, it’s taken considerable time and effort to get control back (I’ll post about this separately!).

Once those critical things were organised, a placeholder page was up quick smart which gave me the time I needed to build the website. I’ve used WordPress, with a customised premium theme. It’s easy to navigate, easy to maintain and it is of course, responsive!