Web design / Charleston, SC
Retire the Rainbow Row photo
Every Charleston business that sells to visitors seems to own the same handful of pictures: Rainbow Row, the pineapple fountain, live oaks hung with moss. They’re lovely. They also say nothing about you, and a visitor who has scrolled past them on twenty other sites stops seeing them at all.
The businesses that stand out here use their own photography: the actual dining room at 7 p.m., the real ceremony lawn, the planner’s hands on an actual table setting. Budget for it early. A good photographer for a day does more for a hospitality site than any amount of design, and our guide for photographers is a decent primer on briefing one.
Selling to people who’ve never been here
Charleston does a large wedding trade, and many of the couples planning one live in other states. They choose venues, planners, florists, caterers and photographers mostly from websites and video calls, sometimes without visiting until the week of the event. That makes the site a sales meeting. It needs to answer what a couple would ask face to face: how many guests fit, what’s included and what isn’t, which dates are open, how far it is from the airport, and where out-of-town guests can stay.
Video helps more here than almost anywhere. A short walk-through of a venue, shot in good light, answers questions that photos can’t, and our motion and film work is built for exactly that kind of piece. Keep it off the homepage autoplay, though. Let people choose to watch.
The same logic applies to anyone selling to visitors during Spoleto Festival USA in late spring, or to families relocating for jobs at MUSC, Boeing in North Charleston or Joint Base Charleston. They’re deciding from a distance, and the site has to do the explaining.
Locals want different things
People who live here want hours, parking and whether you’ll come to them. Charleston proper is a small peninsula, and most of the metro lives off it: Mount Pleasant across the Ravenel Bridge, West Ashley, James Island and Johns Island, Daniel Island (part of the city but in Berkeley County), Summerville in Dorchester County, Goose Creek, North Charleston. Each gets searched by name.
Trying to serve visitors and locals from one homepage usually serves neither. We’d give each audience its own clear path: a section for planning a visit or an event, and a section for the regulars with hours, location and a booking link. That’s ordinary web design judgment, but a lot of sites here skip it.
When the water comes up
Hurricane season runs from June through November, and even without a storm, king tides and heavy rain put water in downtown streets several times a year. When that happens, customers need to know if you’re open before they set out. The sites we build in Framer let your staff switch on a closure banner from a phone in a minute or two, without logging into anything complicated. Pick who’s allowed to do it before the first storm, not during it.
There’s no office on the peninsula or anywhere else, since we work remotely, on the same Eastern clock as the city. Planners and venue managers can review each design from a phone between events, and after launch the closure banner, the menus and the gallery are all yours to change.
Asked on the peninsula
Can couples send wedding inquiries through the site instead of trading emails for weeks?
Yes. An inquiry form that asks for the date, guest count, budget range and the services they want gets you a usable first message instead of “hi, are you available?” It saves both sides several rounds of back-and-forth.