Stacey Merchant runs The Lovely Photo Company, shooting weddings across the North East, Yorkshire, Cumbria and further afield. She has photographed over 100 weddings since 2017, but the website behind that work wasn’t doing it justice. The brief was a full rebuild: a warm, video-led site that felt like her, showed real prices up front, and made it easy for couples to check whether their date was free.
Around 80–90% of her bookings involve video, so film had to sit at the centre of the site rather than being tucked away on a secondary page. Alongside that she wanted a proper portfolio organised by style rather than by venue, dedicated service and location pages, an email capture for her free wedding planning guide, and a site she could actually update herself afterwards.
This was delivered as a fixed-fee £1,300 build, signed in May 2026 and launched in July 2026, with an ongoing monthly hosting and support arrangement. The site was built on WordPress and Elementor Pro, and the build itself was run through an AI-driven pipeline — Claude writing Elementor’s page data directly over an MCP connection, with every page checked by automated browser tests before it went anywhere near the live domain.
| Problem | Solution Implemented |
|---|---|
| A 21-page site plus blog is a lot of build hours at a fixed fee | Built the site through an AI-assisted Elementor pipeline — Claude writing Elementor’s page JSON directly over an MCP connection — producing 23 reusable templates. The approach was written up afterwards as a repeatable playbook for future builds. |
| Video needed to lead the site, not sit in a corner | Put a showreel on the home page behind a click-to-play cover, built a dedicated Films page carrying six videos, and used privacy-enhanced YouTube embeds so nothing is loaded until a visitor asks for it. |
| The portfolio holds hundreds of images the client updates herself | Connected the portfolio directly to the client’s own Google Drive folders, so seven wedding albums — and a separate set of branding and commercial albums — update on the site whenever she adds photos, with no CMS work needed. |
| Enquiries were being missed and there was no way to collect leads | Built six connected forms: a wedding enquiry, a free planning guide download that emails the PDF automatically, a date-check popup triggered on exit or after browsing, and a newsletter signup — all with spam protection and notifications going straight to the client’s inbox. |
| Wedding sites are image-heavy and slow, especially on phones | Added a WebP delivery and image-sizing layer, cut the mobile home page hero from 618 KB to 41.5 KB, deferred analytics and spam-protection scripts until first interaction, and put page caching in front of the site. |
| Handling couples’ personal data brings real privacy obligations | Set up opt-in cookie consent with Google Consent Mode, honoured browser Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals, and rewrote both the privacy and cookie policies to cover the forms, the newsletter and the use of client photographs. |
