Hi everyone, Ian here! Aside from being Janna’s husband and Mr. Bride and Breakfast, I’m also the Technical Director of the site. We launched the new logo and website design a few months ago, and I wanted to take some time to give you a tour of new features in the blog that will help make wedding planning easier for all you brides out there.
The first thing that you’ll probably notice is a rotating banner showing some posts, which are changed weekly to keep the inspiration fresh. We use this slider to highlight notable posts that you might not have seen yet, so if you’re new to the site, or you’re just looking for a good place to start, click on something that interests you to begin exploring Bride and Breakfast.
What we’ve been most excited about in this update is our The Look section, which is present in every wedding, pre-wedding, and post-wedding feature. Over the past five years, we’ve published more than a thousand posts already, and we understand that going through all the weddings in the site might be a bit daunting for new brides. (We’ve heard that a lot of you have went through it from start to finish anyways, so thank you!) Realizing this, we painstakingly tagged our entire archive of posts according to Style, Venue, and Color–as these are probably the things that each bride will decide on and will be looking for their wedding.
Clicking on a Style (for example, Bohemian, Classic Romantic, or Rustic) will take you to all the weddings and pre/post-wedding shoots with that theme, and looking at the posts will guide you on how to conceptualize and execute the style for your own wedding. If you have a particular Venue in mind (let’s say you’re having a Beach or Garden wedding), then you can click on that venue to see all weddings and shoots done in those places, to find inspiration for your own big day. When you click on a Color, it’ll take you to all posts with that color theme, so you can find inspirations for your wedding; be it emerald entourage gowns, a marsala suit, gold decorations, or blush flowers.
Under each post, we also have a related posts section, which will show posts that are similar to the one you’re reading, so you can continue browsing other weddings that have a similar look or the same suppliers, or other articles/posts that may be helpful as you plan your wedding.
We also introduced a streamlined look for our social sharing and comments area at the bottom of the posts, to keep the focus on the content, but still allow you to share the post and interact with us and other readers through the comments. We love hearing from our readers, so we invite you to engage with us by commenting on the posts! And we definitely appreciate all the social media love we get from y’all!
Another thing you’ll see in the homepage, category, tag, and search pages is a Continue Reading button, which we display after a few photos that give an idea of what the look of the wedding or shoot is. Choosing only a few preview photos makes those pages in the site load faster, especially if you’re on a mobile internet connection! If you want to see more, you can always click that button to see the whole post–I wanted to make this clear so everyone knows that there’s more loveliness to be seen after clicking the Continue Reading button!
Just this week, we updated the look of our newsletter to give you a mix of classic inspirations as well as notable posts from the past week. In case you haven’t done so yet, I highly suggest that you sign up here to get your needed weekly dose of wedding inspiration delivered straight to your inbox–we promise to keep it interesting!
Lastly, a few weeks ago, we announced the launch of our YouTube Channel. We posted our first video on How To Do A Romantic Provençal Wedding, and we’re so excited to release a slew of D.I.Y. how tos, tutorials, and other wedding-related videos! For now, in case you haven’t done so yet, please go to our YouTube Channel and give us some love by clicking on the red “Subscribe” button on upper right of the page. This will also help ensure that you don’t miss out on all the video loveliness we plan to send your way!
That’s it for now! The team is definitely working hard to bring some more inspiration to you all, so stay tuned for some other announcements and new features in the site!
