We’re excited to officially unveil the brand-new website for Greengate Manor And Gardens, a premium garden wedding venue in Sanford NC! Designed with our clients and guests in mind, this new digital experience makes it easier than ever to explore our space, get in touch, and envision your next unforgettable event with us. To bring this project to life, we partnered with the talented team at NoiselessMarketing, who helped us transform our vision into a sleek, user-friendly site that truly reflects our venue’s character. We sat down with Aidan Bennett, the lead designer/developer behind the project, to talk about the design process, key features, and what it takes to build a website that stands out in the event industry.
1. What was your design inspiration behind the new website for our event and wedding venue in Sanford North Carolina?
As a garden wedding venue in Sanford NC, Greengate Manor And Gardens is a property that holds a lot of history already. That certainly helped define a design language that fit well. Beyond that, the team this venue has behind it is passionate and extremely knowledgeable of that classic southern charm their property has. This all makes collaborating on a new website quite fun and inspiring all on its own.
2. What was your favorite page to design?
Whenever you have a lot of dynamic information to communicate on a web page, it becomes a very unique challenge to do so in a user-friendly way. I believe the Pricing page reflected this challenge. With information on renting the wedding venue, pricing for specific packages, certain days that cost more or less than others, and more, it becomes a question of what is the customer looking for, how can we make sure their experience is as satisfactory as possible? I believe we accomplished that with some great feedback from Greengate Manor And Gardens along the way.
3. Can you tell us about the strategy behind organizing our 10 unique pages, including weddings, social events, gallery, and more?
How you organize the sitemap of your website really comes down to user experience. As a business owner, you have to put away your preferences, as an agency like NoiselessMarketing, we have to keep up with what is familiar to users and what is not. A lot of companies and designers like to create incredibly unique systems for navigating a website, which is a wildly impressive way to flex their knowledge of design platforms and infrastructures. However, the practical use cases for this kind of design is limited. To us, it’s not about designing something incredibly unique every chance you get, it’s about applying the client’s brand to a system that the users are going to enjoy interacting with. Our strategy for this was the same as our strategy for everything, collaboration. NoiselessMarketing brought our knowledge of UX design, Greengate Manor And Gardens brought their expertise as a venue, and Michelle (their Head of Business Development) brought her unique experience as an event planner who has interacted with countless wedding venue websites before.
4. You did such a great job capturing our southern charm aesthetic on the website. Can you share how you were able to accomplish this with revisions?
Thank you! Revisions are an important part of any creative process. When we tackle a piece of content, a page design, a contact form, or any other factors of a website, we do so understanding that we may not hit the mark on the first try. Revisions help our customers not feel stuck with a product they’re unsatisfied with and help us accomplish what we’ve set out to do. With this project specifically, expressing the historical southern charm that this venue carries was a high priority, to do that correctly, it took multiple discovery sessions for alignment and design iterations for conclusiveness. In the end, it had a lot to do with the photos we chose to represent different aspects of the venue. Above all else, it was accomplished through welcomed collaboration from our team and the gracious staff at Greengate Manor And Gardens.
5. Can you explain how the site is optimized for mobile users, especially those searching for wedding venues near Raleigh, Apex, Pinehurst and Southern Pines NC?
The most important thing you can do for mobile searchability is ensure your website is mobile-optimized properly. If a website isn’t usable on mobile devices, people won’t stay on the website for very long, which tells Google it isn’t quality content, and that takes your website down in the rankings. Our priority was to create a great experience for both desktop and mobile-users in an effort to establish great usability as a framework for ranking higher in search results.
6. What SEO practices did you implement to help our site rank higher for terms like "Small Wedding Venue"?
After we’ve established the groundwork with good performance, we can dive into an on-page SEO strategy. We kicked this off and found terms like “Wedding Venue Sanford NC” and others that are relevant to Greengate Manor And Gardens. Once we find the ample keywords, our next priority is crafting quality content around those keywords. The tough part is striking a balance between targeting high traffic keywords and actually being what that traffic is looking for with their search. If a customer searches for xyz, we want to show up for xyz because we have what they want to see, not just because we want their attention. If we capture attention that doesn’t want our product, conversion rates plummet.
7. What was the most challenging part of designing a website for a garden wedding venue?
Every wedding venue’s product is their space. However, with a garden wedding venue like Greengate Manor And Gardens, the space extends to the outside as well. The most challenging part was designing layouts that showed off the venue with photos as the focal point. Words do great in describing emotions and offerings, but people want to see the garden wedding venue they’re going to book for their event. While we had the photos to use, it was an in-depth process to arrange them in layouts across the website that did not overwhelm the customer on desktop or mobile.
8. What advice would you give to other venue owners looking to build a compelling website that attracts local event bookings?
I believe that the secret is in finding your venue’s unique value and targeting an audience that wants that. With Greengate Manor And Gardens, the unique value is its history and ability to have aged like a fine bottle of wine. Not every couple wants a venue with that aesthetic. That’s okay because we want quality visitors on the website, meaning visitors that are more likely to convert than to not. I advise venue owners to understand your target customer, why they would want to book your venue, and how you can get your venue in front of those people specifically. Maybe that’s a new website, maybe it’s community events, a lot of times it should be both!
We’re thrilled with how our new website captures the spirit of Greengate Manor And Gardens, and we hope you are too. Whether you’re planning a wedding, corporate event, or private celebration, our updated site makes it easier than ever to get inspired and get in touch. Take a look around, explore the new features, and when you’re ready—reach out to book your next event with us. We can’t wait to host you!
