Bloom

Bloom is a wedding website powered by WordPress which caters to wedding planners, agencies, photographers and even florists.

It is a business theme which has key interaction areas which provide a prospect to contact the company to obtain further information or make an appointment for the corresponding services.

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Process

My process for designing and developing themes has varied each time, mainly because I want to try new things, challenge what I know and push myself to do better.

In this case, I began looking to see if wedding websites were being catered to within the marketplace, is there a real need for this time of product?

It turns out the wedding category did not have much competition, but the few themes that were being sold seemed to have a high demand – simply based on the amount of sales for the themes in conjunction with when exactly the theme was created.

I also decided to look into the comments of the existing themes and started getting an indication of what kind of key features customers would want for their wedding website.

Here are just a few examples of what I found:

• Countdown timmer
• Rich photo galleries
• RSVP contact forms
• Profile sections for wedding parties
• Event scheduling

You see, once I started to get a better understanding of what the market was asking for it allowed me to conceptualise how the pages would look.

I used a process called style tiles, which provided a way to begin to establish the look and feel. From this, I went straight into browser as I didn’t feel the need to really create full page mockups.

I would iterate through the designs directly in code, tweaking the typography, iconography, colour palettes, etc – all being helped by the earlier work I had done with the style tiles. Essentially, it became my guide.

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Testing and documentation

After a few months, I had all the required pages designed and developed. In retrospect its hard to say whether I saved time by not using high-fidelity mocks, I think it actually simply depends with the project at hand.

It’s with this that I then tested my theme, prepared the documentation and submitted it to the marketplace for review and approval.

Check out the full page screenshot below or find the live preview here.