How to have a stand out celebrant website

How to have a stand out celebrant website

Having a stand out celebrant website can be the difference between getting the bookings you want or waiting on enquiries. It is the shopfront to your celebrant business and one of the main tools you have to impress, before you meet a client in person. At the Academy of Modern Celebrancy , in addition to celebrant training, we design websites for our celebrants; let’s take you through our top 3 picks and why we think they represent the best in the business.

Designing a celebrant website that truely suits you, as a celebrant and as a business, takes creativity and a strong brand. These top 3 websites are not only visually appealing but they convert enquiry to booking, giving the celebrants the business they want.

First up, let’s dive into what you need on your website to ensure it stands out above the rest. As a celebrant, your business will thrive on the positive relationships you build with your clients, and on how you interact and communicate with them. You are playing such an important role in some of the most emotionally charged and memorable moments of a person’s life; how your celebrant website communicates (digitally) with your clients, and how they feel when using it, can be just as important as their experience of you in person. Pixelated images and confusing content are just some ways to turn clients off…leading them to log off. Don’t worry! We are here to share some top tips on how to ensure a potential client not only stays on your celebrant website, but presses that all important enquiry button!

What are the top 5 things your celebrant website needs, to make your business stand out?

Strong brand

As a celebrant, you are your business and you are your brand; your clients are buying into you, and the service and experience that you are providing. Your brand identity is what will set you apart from others and will clearly communicate the essence of who you are, to your clients.

Let’s try something…grab a notebook and pen and ask yourself a few questions: Who are you, as a celebrant? What kind of clients are you wanting to appeal to? What type of services are you offering? What differentiates you from others? How do you want to make your clients feel? Now, take a look at your answers…what you have there is the essence of what your celebrant business is all about…in short, you have your brand! Hooray! Now, it is your next job to communicate it. All of the visual elements of your website need to authentically represent your brand – the images, the colours, the layout, your logo.

Every communication on your celebrant website, whether it’s the service information you provide or a blog post that you have written, they all need to represent your brand identity. It is possible to build a full time celebrant business; you want your ideal clients to be coming to you because they want you and not just for the price you offer; clear vision and clear communication of your brand – through your celebrant website – will go a long way to making that happen. 

Unique design

Your website design will be naturally led by your brand identity and should consistently carry that clear brand identity, throughout. Time to grab that notebook and pen again…jot down all the things that set you apart from others and ask yourself why your clients should choose you.

For your celebrant website to be a stand out one, it will visually meet the needs of your ideal client. What kind of images do they want to see? What ceremony styles are your clients looking for? What will inspire your clients to want to know more about you?

Your investment  in a professional looking, well designed site that clearly communicates your unique brand, will really boost your image, and your reputation as a successful industry professional. 

Targeted content

This comes back to who your ideal clients are, what style of ceremony you are wanting to offer, and who you want your services to appeal to. Take time to understand your client needs and put yourself in their position: What information might you want to see? What blogs might you want to read? What style of celebration might you be looking for? What ceremony inspiration might capture your imagination?

Make sure that every part of your celebrant website, whether through images or words, is targeted toward your ideal client…it needs to resonate with them, engage with them and incite them into action (that all important contact button!).

Sharp, tailored images

Gone are the days of using our phones or relying on pixelated images to do the job. Quality matters when it comes to building your reputation as an industry professional and the standard of the images on your celebrant website will need to reflect that. 

Images are another way to help your website communicate with potential clients and used effectively, can be a useful conversion tool (turning enquiry to booking). The quality of your images will markedly increase the professional appearance of your website and in turn improve user experience: by using visuals to communicate emotion, represent your brand and to help clients really visualise your ideas. 

Good quality and well labelled images can also help to improve your opportunities to be discovered, through targeted Search Engine Optimisation (we will talk about SEO in a little more detail, later) as your website will show up on hits for web searches and images searches, both of which can be clicked on to drive traffic to your website.

Easy customer experience

Not many of us would enjoy a messy, cluttered shopping experience on the high street. Have you ever entered a clothes shop to look for that top you saw in their magazine, only to find yourself digging through piles of disorganised, and picked over garments? Or maybe you need something quite specific from your local supermarket, but they have moved it to an unmarked and all too illusive, special offer aisle? Shopping or seeking information online can be just as frustrating, but the difference is that if our online experience is not a positive one, it is very easy to leave the site and open a different website – much easier than it would be to get in your car and try a different supermarket. This is why it is really important that your celebrant website is simple, clear and easy to navigate. 

You need to make it easy for your clients to contact you, whether through phone number, email and with links to social media. 

The information you provide needs to be clear, engaging and on brand. 

Try it out for yourself…visit your celebrant website regularly and make sure it remains current, visually appealing and that it is a nice, easy experience to find the information your next client might need. This could well be a potential client’s first taste of what it might be like to work with you in person, and that impression needs to be a positive and stress-free one that really communicates the essence of your brand.

What platform should I use to set up my celebrant website?

Firsty, what do we mean by platform? A Content Management System (CMS) is a platform (software) which you can use to design and create content for a website, without having to know how to use code. Though how do you decide which CMS will be best for you? Here at ACM we use, and usually recommend, using WordPress. In our opinion, using WordPress for your celebrant website is a sound choice as it is suited toward all experience levels, as there is free and comprehensive access to as much or as little support as is needed. 

A great example of this is the WordPress SEO support. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital when it comes to the visibility of your celebrant website. SEO, in brief, is a method for making sure that internet search engines, such as Google, put your website in front of your target audience. This could be with use of certain keywords from your site content – such as the information pages, the blogs that you write or the descriptions you add to your images. WordPress has some great basic SEO TIPS (and some more in depth ones through use of additional plugins) that can guide you through your unpublished content and suggest improvements. This SEO tool works with Google’s algorithms, behind the scenes, to pick up on that content and help your celebrant website climb up the search engine ranks, toward the top…right where you want to be! 

How do I set up an email address for my celebrant business?

Your web design company should be able to provide you with an email address or you can use google email. We don’t recommend using options such as gmail (spam being a big factor) and, in our experience, having an email address that is linked to your business name or domain can really help with your professional image and reputation. It may seem simple or silly but it does work! Let’s pretend for a moment that you are looking for someone to provide a professional service…you need a podiatrist, for example. Are you more inclined to call Feetso@gmail.com or Jane@feetso.com Your answer to that might help you decide for yourself, which email format is right for your celebrant brand.

How much should I spend on a celebrant website?

At the AMC we specialise in celebrant training and celebrant website design, and offer ‘whole-brand’ design and support packages start at £1495. There will be many of you reading this blog who might now feel a little overwhelmed by having started to consider the technical nitty gritty of that stand out celebrant website. It will be key to your celebrant business success – there is no getting around that – but please don’t worry, we got you! We understand what it’s like to want to do more of what you love and are great at…this is exactly why it makes good business sense to invest in our website design service…it’s what we love and are great at! 

Your whole-brand website design with AMC is a really full, tailored package of support. Starting from the core essentials such as helping you with your brand story and brand identity; sourcing your website domain and email; helping you design your logo; writing all your website content, help with your site images; taking care of your SEO for you; and even getting you up and running on your social media channels, such as helping your really immerse yourself in Pinterest, to increase brand awareness and open up your networking opportunities. We may be biassed, but we have seen the success of those we have helped and can stand by our belief that this will be one of the most important financial investments you will make, and the one from which you will enjoy the most return.

Can I design my own celebrant brand?

You can and there are tools out there such as Canva that you can use. We suspect that if you are asking yourself the question, that you might be a little unsure of where to start…and you are not alone! If you want to design and build a professional looking brand for your celebrant website, and you aren’t crafty yourself, then ACM is able to do this for you. You will have as much input as you need and we work with you to create the logo, website and overall celebrant brand identity that communicates the very essence of what you are all about. 

This is one investment that you will make for your business that will pay off in dividends because your look will be so strong and authentic, just like our top 3 celebrant website picks!

Let’s take a look at 3 of our top celebrant website picks and why we think they stand out

www.rockmyceremony.com

First impressions matter and we think Katie Louise has nailed it with a celebrant website ‘pops’ from the start. When you arrive at the homepage you are greeted by a beautiful, high quality image of Katie Louise officiating a ceremony, which incites in us an instant feeling of warmth, joy and professionalism. The logo is clear and simple, allowing it to be recognisable as representative of Katie Louise’s brand identity. 

Personality stands out, with the content being as bold with its infographics as it is in its words. What we mean by that is the way in which Rock My Ceremony has welcomed clients from the start and has offered potential clients an immediate snapshot of Katie Louise’s celebrant personality. This really helps a client figure out, at the offset, whether this brand and this personality style is something that they could work with. 

Brand style feels unique with a fun, bold and energetic feel to it. Through a clever use of impactive words, Katie Louise is letting you know that your ceremony can totally rock! Literally telling you to ditch the usual obligations, forget what everyone else might want from your day and push forward with an occasion that is all about you. We feel like we are having a pep talk from a good friend! It gives the impression that Katie Louise will embolden you to own your unique ideas and support you every step of the way. Continuity of brand identity has been carefully upheld throughout the pages on Rock My Ceremony. No matter which menu page we click on, there is no mistaking where we are and who we are engaging with.

Accessibility and a smooth user experience matters if we are to avoid making it cumbersome to find the information your client is looking. The menus options on the Rock My Ceremony homepage are clear, and when you click on an option it takes you to the information you were expecting to find…that may sound obvious but I think we have all found ourselves a little bamboozled by a tenuous link between what you expected and what you found, when it comes to accessing information on the web.

Now, it is your turn…we hope you didn’t put that notebook away!

Take a good look around these next 2, of our top 3 picks. Put yourself in a client’s shoes; use the ideas and tips you have picked up in this blog; make notes of all the things you like about the user experience; pay attention to the way in which brand identity has been used.

Experiencing this user journey will really help you gain a level of understanding from the perspective of potential clients, and is a sure fire way to help you decide what will work for your stand out celebrant website, and how having a professionally designed, well executed celebrant website can be the key to converting enquiries into bookings.

www.bohoceremonies.com

www.lemonadeceremonies.co.uk

Support is here for you, every step of the way

Celebrants are in increasing demand both in th UK and worldwide, as more people seek to make their ceremony a truly personalised one. Making that decision to change your career, or investing in yourself and your new business, might feel daunting…but you are not alone in your journey. Celebrant training and support is at the heart of everything we do here at AMC. Doing something you are passionate about is incredibly rewarding; Web design, celebrant training and ongoing celebrant support are our specialties and what we LOVE to do!

Here at AMC we have designed hundreds of celebrant websites. Maybe you are already a trained celebrant, and now you want to get creative and make a start on that website, without delay? We hear you! Use this form to send us your details, and we will get the ball rolling and get you well on your way to owning your own stand out celebrant website!