Stacey Merchant has been photographing weddings since 2017, with more than a hundred under her belt across the North East and beyond. She came to me needing a site that actually did justice to her work. Galleries that showed the photography properly, clear pricing couples could understand before they even got in touch, and a simple enquiry route. Not a template that squashed everything into the same box.
The brief covered the full picture: photography, videography, portfolio galleries, a pricing page with an estimator, an FAQ, location pages and a custom 404. Twenty-one pages in total, built on WordPress, then migrated from local development to live hosting on DreamHost.
One thing Stacey was clear about from the start was honesty. No invented ratings, no fake review counts. The site says what she offers and lets the photography do the rest.
| Problem | Solution Implemented |
|---|---|
| A wedding photographer's site lives or dies on how images are shown, and a generic template would flatten them. | Built a 21-page WordPress site with dedicated portfolio and film galleries, service pages, a pricing page with an estimator, FAQ, location pages and a custom 404, all designed to let the photography lead. |
| Building a page-builder site by hand is slow and makes it easy for brand styles to drift from page to page. | Had Claude write the Elementor layout data directly over an automation bridge, working from one declarative definition per page so visual consistency was baked in rather than policed manually. |
| Every page needed to hold up on phones, tablets and desktops without anything overflowing or breaking. | Ran an automated Playwright audit across 23 templates at three screen widths. The build reached a clean pass with no layout overflow and no broken images. |
| Site-wide polish is hard to maintain when styles are edited page by page inside a builder. | Moved shared styling and behaviour into 16 small custom mu-plugins, roughly four thousand lines of PHP, so the header, forms, galleries and the 404 all behaved consistently without page-level overrides. |
| Importing client images through the normal route was blocked by a hosting security rule. | Copied the files directly into the uploads folder and registered them with a one-off importer, then served them as WebP at appropriate sizes. |
| The site needed analytics and search visibility in place from day one, not retrofitted later. | Connected Google Analytics and Search Console before launch, confirmed a clean crawl, a working sitemap and correct responses on every page. |