Who is Island Weddings Mallorca?
Island Weddings Mallorca is the leading wedding planner on the island of Mallorca. They’ve been in business for over ten years and during that time have built a reputation for quality, excellence and professionalism.
With their unparalleled knowledge about the island they know how to get things done so that a client’s dream wedding goes off perfectly and without a hitch.
What was the brief?
Island Weddings had an extremely slow and unresponsive website. They wanted the website rebuilt, brought up to date and deployed on our network for hosting.
Specific requests were an active testimonial page, gallery functionality and then an SEO campaign to increase traffic to the site. We also designed a lightweight video player that utilises Cloudflare’s new Stream technology.
How did we do it?
We rebuilt the entire website from scratch using a new colour scheme and custom coded some animations, sliders and gallery effects. We also streamlined the site code so that the pages loaded in milliseconds rather than five seconds like before.
We also migrated the site from the old domain name to the new one and write a few hundred redirect rules to ensure traffic was being sent from the old site to the new one.
The end result
The bride enters
The home page features a full screen intro image superimposed with the menu, logo and title.
Also featured on this page are available services and easy links to the other important parts of the website.
Gorgeous Gallery Pages
For weddings, photos are everything so we wrote some lightweight gallery sliders to show off the photos from weddings that had already taken place.
Clicking on the relevant sliders opens up a full screen gallery that can be clicked or swiped through by the visitor.
The Dream Team
Sara & Marcos are the lead wedding team for Island Weddings so it was important to have a full page dedicated to information about them.
Also on this page is a video that slides in on page load and starts to play so that the visitor can learn more about the team.
The Testimonial Page
Island Weddings have some amazing feedback and comments from their past clients so it made sense to really show that off.
We created a testimonial page and on clicking read more for each testimonial a full screen review opens up as is shown below.
Testimonial Overlay
This animation flies in and expands to full screen to show the past clients review and feedback of the service.
There were so many reviews we just had to make them a feature of the website. Nothing proves competence more than other people recommending you!
Mobile Service
Over 50% of website visitors now use mobile devices. We made Island Weddings a responsive design to give that smooth app like interface and user experience.
We stripped back and optimised the code for mobile devices and made sure that images were properly optimised for retina devices so that they looked crystal clear on iPhone and other HD devices.
Mobile Locations Page
It was important to showcase the beautiful locations that Mallorca has available to get married in.
We made sure that images were correctly sized and formatted for use on mobile devices such as iPhones as there’s nothing worse than a website slow to load on a mobile!
We also used JavaScript to re-order page layout for mobile devices so that things fit better and were easy to navigate. Last but not least we increased the font size and used liberal amounts of white space to give a spacious feel on mobiles.
The Nerdy Stuff
It was so nice to work with Sara and Marcos on this project who are a wonderful team. It was also great to get such high quality images to display which really allowed us to emphasise the quality of the company through the website. Here’s some of the technical stuff we did…
Stats
Video Player
We used Cloudflare’s new Stream technology to build a custom HTML5 video player for the pages that needed it. This enables videos to load with no ads (YouTube we’re looking at you!) and play instantly on page load.
JSon Schema Markup
Using schema markup in the code allowed us to highlight to Google what is important about each page. This gives us finer control over how search engines interpret and display the website’s content.
Animations
We used CSS animations for things such as menu fly ins, gallery overlays and testimonial pops. Utilising CSS animations and some JavaScript ensured that the effects would work cross-browser rather than depending on third party plugins or polyfills.
DevOps
We moved the site from the old domain to the new one and set up server redirects to transfer traffic from the old site to the new one. We also moved Island Weddings to one of our self-built servers so that it would run and load in super fast time.
Scripts
Everything on the site is custom coded for efficiency. We created multiple functions to deal with Ajax calls, smooth scrolling, gallery functions and of course menu actions. We also stripped out much of WordPress’s code bloat to minimise the unnecessary HTML in the pages.
Optimisation
As the site would be hosted on our network we were able to fully optimise the delivery of the website pages, images and content. We wrote custom Nginx/ngx_PageSpeed configuration rules to handle image optimisaton on the fly as well as minification and compression of assets. Last but not least we deployed the site on Cloudflare for fast global access and wrote some Cloudflare workers rules to handle caching of all content for non-logged in users.
