Website Proposal
Twenty-five years of work, finally in a place that looks like it.
Starting point
I've read both documents closely. They're more thorough than most of what agencies produce after a paid discovery phase, and they mean this project starts about three weeks ahead of where it normally would. Settled already:
What's left is execution, and a handful of decisions I'll bring you with a recommendation rather than an open question.
You already did the hard part. You just did it in a document instead of on a website.
Diagnosis
I went through happilyeverafterbyamy.com and its sitemaps before writing this. Everything below is fixable, and most of it explains why organic inquiries have thinned out.
Six of your seven featured weddings were last updated in September 2018. A couple evaluating you today is looking at work from eight years ago.
The default WordPress "Hello world!" post, a 2018 HTML sitemap, and two theme demo pages are all live and indexed.
heaeventschicago.com currently serves a GoDaddy one-page holding site, separate from the ProPhoto build you've been working in.
The original hosting, the GoDaddy builder, and ProPhoto at $39/month. After launch you'll need a domain registration and nothing else.
Seventeen years producing in Los Angeles before Chicago is the single strongest thing about your positioning, and it appears nowhere.
Fourteen pages and seven portfolio entries. What carries your ranking is domain history and your venue and directory links, not page wording. Page-by-page redirects protect it. Reusing old copy is not required.
Approach
The interface stays restrained. Warm neutral grounds, generous negative space, and your weddings supplying the emotion and the palette.
Varied image scale, full-bleed moments, considered crops, asymmetry. Your brief specifically rules out photo-text-photo-text, and that's the standard I'm designing against.
Used in small, deliberate places. Warm ivory and stone carry the page. Nothing coastal, nothing predominantly blue.
Static hosting on Netlify, which is free and serves full-screen wedding photography instantly. Image-heavy planner sites usually die on load time. This one won't.
The homepage sells you, your point of view, and the work. The three Collections are introduced within that, not in place of it.
Domain, hosting account, image files, and the site itself. You are never waiting on anyone to publish, and never locked to me.
Structure
Exactly as your brief specifies. Beyond the seven, the one structural decision worth making is whether individual real-wedding pages launch with the site. They're the strongest tool you have for showing up in searches tied to specific Chicago venues, and they give each wedding a link you can send to a venue or a photographer. My recommendation is eight of them at launch.
The Journal stays in phase two, as your brief suggests. A blog only helps if something keeps it moving, and that's a conversation for after launch.
Direction
Working from the direction already established. Final selections are yours to confirm.
Extraordinary Weddings, Expertly Produced
Cormorant Garamond · Montserrat
This document is set in the pairing and palette I'd propose, so you're reading the direction rather than a description of it.
Investment
The Launch
$2,950
Recommended
The Editorial
$3,850
Ongoing
Continued Care
$150 / month
A note on the number. When we spoke, I gave you a range based on what I could see of your current site. Your brief describes something more ambitious than that — a Press page, individual wedding features, and an editorial layout standard that specifically rules out anything templated. The Launch is the site I quoted you on the phone. The Editorial is the site your brief actually describes. I'd rather show you both and let you choose than quietly move the number.
On the care plan, plainly: this site is built to be fast and to cost nothing to host, and the tradeoff is that adding a wedding feature isn't a drag-and-drop job. Continued Care is how that happens, and after eight years of a site you couldn't change, I'd rather you never think about it again than hand you one more thing to maintain.
Handover Training — $550. If you'd also like to make the smaller changes yourself, a headline or a price or a paragraph on your Services page, this is a ninety-minute working session, recorded, plus a written guide specific to your site and thirty days of questions afterward. Many clients take both: I keep the galleries and anything structural, you keep control of the words.
Open items
Your brief closes with items to finalize. I'll bring each one with a recommendation, so none of them becomes a homework assignment.
Your part
Your brief already lists what a designer needs. Here it is narrowed to what only you can provide:
Everything else — existing copy, venue credits, contact details, the redirect map, image file naming and alt text — I'll build myself. You will not be sent a fifty-item list, and nothing here needs to be finished before we start.
Schedule
Six weeks from the day your materials arrive. Starting in early September puts the site live in mid-October, just ahead of the stretch between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day when most couples get engaged and start looking for a planner.
| Week | What happens | Payment |
|---|---|---|
| One | Deposit and your five items received. Design and build begins. | $1,350 |
| Two | Full draft site live on a private preview link. | $1,250 |
| Three | Your review. Feedback within five business days keeps us on schedule. | — |
| Four | First round of revisions. | — |
| Five | Your second review, then final refinements. | — |
| Six | Launch. Redirects live, analytics connected, walkthrough session. | $1,250 |
Figures shown for The Editorial. The clock starts when your materials arrive, not when the deposit clears, so a busy week on your end never becomes a missed date on mine. The only thing that moves the launch date is how quickly feedback comes back during your two review weeks, which I know is a real question in the middle of wedding season. I'd rather commit to six weeks and hand it to you in five.
Terms
Send the five items whenever you have them together. Once they land, I'll confirm the start date, and we'll be live inside six weeks.
Nine months is long enough. Let's finish it.