Challenge
Based in South Carolina, Mary started her photography business in 2008 after she married her husband and he was deployed to Iraq with the Marine Corps. She specializes in wedding and family photography, as well as destination weddings.
Jessica met Mary through the Greenville, SC chapter of the Rising Tide Society. Called "Tuesdays Together", it is a society of creative entrepreneurs gathering on the second Tuesday of every month in the spirit of "Community over Competition."
Mary was using Blu Domain, which is an HTML platform, for her photography website, but she was using WordPress for her blog. It soon became clear that she needed a single website for her business.
After discussing the situation, we agreed that it was best to consolidate Mary's two websites into a single WordPress ecosystem to make it easier for her to manage content. In technical terms, this would require an extensive migration between very different website environments.
Solution
Moving data from Mary's WordPress blog to her new WordPress installation was fairly straightforward. A like-for-like migration allows you to export and import content with a few button clicks. However, moving her photography portfolio from its HTML environment was a bit more delicate.
To minimize data loss, we downloaded a copy of Mary's HTML site onto a local server. That way we could still work with the content online without having to go through Blu Domain.
Then we uploaded all the photos to the new WordPress site and displayed them in a clean, minimalist design with beautiful galleries. We also included a drag-and-drop page builder to allow Mary to add photos quickly.
Results
Brand consistency is paramount in creative industries such as photography. Mary now has a website whose quality matches that of her work. She doesn't have to think twice before sharing her web address. She's not wasting time anymore figuring out how to edit the content of a page or having to log in to a separate website to write a blog post. She has the world's most powerful blogging platform at her fingertips.
"It was very easy to work with Jessica. Even though I'm not tech-savvy when it comes to websites, she was patient with me and provided instructional videos which helped me understand how to use my website. I recommend her all the time to my small business friends."
- Mary DeCrescenzio, Owner