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We want the WeddingWise blog to be a great resource for brides, but we also want to offer wedding vendors some useful tips for creating a successful wedding business. Every month we’ll be posting wedding business advice in our Vendor Tips column. This week – we’re talking about websites.

Your website is often the first contact a bride will have with your company. She might be Googling for a particular product, or a friend might have sent her the link to your company. But once she lands on your site, you want her to stick around as long as possible – and hopefully choose you as her vendor.

It helps to think of your website as an online storefront – first impressions count. You wouldn’t open up shop in the morning with rubbish on the doorstep or grubby front windows. Likewise, you shouldn’t leave your website unattended. Here are five tips to improve your vendor website:

1. Professional Design

Even if you’re not very web-savvy, your clients are, and if a bride sees an amateur, template site, she’s going to assume your company is amateur, too. Your website design is an investment that will pay for itself many times over – so bite the bullet and invest in a professional design. If you have a tiny budget, talk to design students or ask for a service swap from a designer friend.

2. Vibrant, Professional Imagery

Most brides are looking for visual inspiration for their weddings - just look at how they are using Pinterest for wedding planning. Your imagery needs to be aspirational - it needs to show the bride how your product will become part of an overall wedding décor scheme that’s as well articulated as any wedding magazine shoot. Whether you’re selling stationary, flowers, or gowns, make sure your photographs are professional, beautiful and the focal point of your site.

3. Testimonials

When choosing a wedding vendor, one of the most pressing questions for a bride is whether you’re business is trustworthy: can you deliver on your promise? One way you can demonstrate trustworthiness on your website is by including testimonials – references written by previous clients praising your services.

After imagery, testimonials are one of the first things a bride will look for on your site, so make sure they are prominently featured.

Independent reviews on industry websites such as WeddingWise are even more valuable, as customers trust them more than the reviews you post yourself.  So if you’ve got a profile with independent reviews, link that from your website, too.

4. A Clear Call to Action

A “call to action” is marketing speak for “telling a visitor to do something”. A call to action might be “buy now” or “call to make an appointment” or “visit us today” or “sign up to the mailing list”. Every page of your website needs a call to action – and it needs to be prominent and simple – make it as easy as possible for brides to contact you or purchase from your site.

5. An Integrated Blog or Social Media Profiles

A blog (like this one) featuring fresh content on a regular basis will not only keep brides coming back to your website again and again, it will help your site rank better in the search engines – so more brides will find you. If you don’t have the time to create a blog yourself, you can hire a writer to create it for you.

Like a blog, social media pages are also a great way to keep your brand in front of brides. For wedding vendors, Facebook pages (see ours) and Pinterest (see ours) are probably the best social media sites to try, as they allow a lot of visual content sharing.

Whichever social media sites you choose to use, make sure that you’re sharing them on your website!

How is your wedding website performing? What other website tips can you offer wedding vendors?

Brides, what would you like to see on a vendor’s website?