Case study · Events and hospitality
The Wildflower Barn
WordPress Website for a Hill Country Wedding Venue
The Wildflower Barn runs two wedding venues on one Texas Hill Country property. We built its WordPress site in 2017, with online rental agreements and a password-protected area for booked couples. In 2022 the original theme lost support and the owners could no longer edit their own pages, so we rebuilt every page on Elementor with the same look, updated WordPress and its plugins, and launched in November 2022.
Overview
The Wildflower Barn is a wedding venue in the Texas Hill Country with two separate venues on one property, the Meadow Barn and the Bluebonnet Barn. It offers couples a simple, laid-back experience with an open vendor policy and straightforward pricing.
We built the venue's WordPress site in 2017, then rebuilt it in 2022 when the original theme stopped being supported.
The Challenge
A wedding venue's site does more than show photos. Couples read about each venue, check booking details and sign rental agreements, and booked couples need a private place to find rental lists, packages and answers to common questions.
The 2017 site was built on a ProPhoto theme. By 2022 that version of ProPhoto was no longer supported and the newer version could not be bought for a self-hosted site. WordPress was stuck on an old release, PHP could not be upgraded, the Instagram feed had stopped working, and the owners could no longer edit pages or swap out photos themselves.
What We Built
The original site, 2017
A WordPress site with pages for each venue, the chapel, vendors, booking information, testimonials, press features and directions. Booked couples get a password-protected My Wedding area with FAQs, the in-house rental list, packages and documents. We rebuilt the venue's online rental and split-payment agreements as forms that email the venue, its billing team and the renter, and added live chat, a call and text button and an Instagram feed.
Rebuilt on Elementor, 2022
We set up a staging copy and rebuilt every page in Elementor with the same look, so the owners could edit text and photos on their own. WordPress moved from 5.6 to 6.0 and every plugin was updated. At the venue's request we simplified the menu, dropped the spotlight, testimonials and directions pages, renamed Locations to Venues and put their new copy on the homepage.
Checked before launch
We restored the Instagram feed, wrote an SEO title and meta description for every page, and tested all seven agreement and contact forms, including where each one sends its email. Header images were reworked for phones, and the site was checked on iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy phones and on Windows and Mac desktops before it went live in November 2022. We then walked the owners through editing it.
When the venue made content changes on the staging copy after launch, we moved those posts and pages to the live site without overwriting its settings.
Results
- One site for the whole booking journey: venue pages, booking information, signed agreements and a private area for booked couples.
- The owners edit their own pages and photos again after the 2022 rebuild.
- Current WordPress and plugins instead of a theme that had stopped getting updates.