Pretty In White

LABZ : In June 2008, I had written an email to Pretty In White, seeking sponsorship for wedding gowns as I was organizing a community event. They surprised me by agreeing to loan their wedding gowns and to be a part of our affiliate program. Fast forward a couple of months with 3 more successful community events, I approached them with a proposal to revamp their website. Bear in mind, I was still a noob to the internet despite tinkering with a whole slew of online tools, I was definitely curious if the job could be done to Pretty In White’s satisfaction. Thankfully, they were receptive of the proposal and placed a lot of faith in the project, even though I was a career Hotelier with no formal training in design and IT!

At that very time, there were many wedding photographers out in the Malaysian Market’s which started using WordPress as a medium to sell their products and services, which I thought was very interesting. These photographers actually took the trouble to customize their self hosted WordPress blogs in looking unique and appealing. The thought of using this very engine for Pretty In White was a rather daring and bold idea, as this was a blog engine, and not a professional website template! However, there were definitely many positive points in using a blog engine, namely the ease to update information in keeping your customers up to date. Moreover, the market for WordPress templates were beginning to grow as freelance designers begin to experiment, there was definitely a glimmer of hope for me!

So I sat down with the team at Pretty In White to break the misconception of having a blog engine as website, coincidentally, I got this idea from their photography partners. I was worried as this would be my first official experiment on WordPress and we are talking about an Established Designer Wedding Gown Boutique of repute here! Thank goodness the owners of Pretty In White were extremely understanding and willing to try something a little off the beaten path at that time.  The result was as follows;

For their new website, we had opted for a template that was clean and simple, with the emphasis on ease of navigation. This happened to be found in the template called Atlantica by Brandon R. Jones. Pretty In White’s new website focused on a moving feature slide show as a header, a featured article widget, flipping book and plenty of pictures that could be easily uploaded and maintained by themselves. Much customization had went into this template, from logos to menu drop downs, and to fool the general visitor, I even added the touch of a .html extension at the end of every url address!