1st Call for Weddings is a wedding site specialising in once worn designer wedding dresses sold by Ruth Paul from her Showroom in Pangbourne, England.

The site first went live in August 1999 with two main features to the site: A showcase of Ruth's best dresses for sale and a classified advertising section allowing brides to sell their dresses from their homes. The site has since added a wedding services section and an on-line shop from which Ruth sells many of the accessories her prospective brides will need. The on-line shop uses a shopping cart system with payments taken by secure credit card transactions using a secure payment gateway.
Web Site Traffic

Traffic to the site was meagre in the first six months as we had identified the wrong keywords to bring traffic in. Whilst we quickly achieved a number one ranking on AltaVista for "designer wedding dresses" we found out that brides were actually typing "wedding dresses". As soon as we realised this, we resubmitted the site with pages optimised for "wedding dresses" since when we have achieved top ten rankings with most of the major search engines. As a consequence, the site now receives up to five thousand visitors per day, leading to significant business for Ruth.

Analysis of the web site logs tells us that visitors to the site spend most of their time looking at the Showroom section. Ruth had record sales of her designer dresses in February 2004.

E-commerce Solutions
The on-line shop has been a feature of the site for three years now. Ruth regularly sells bridal shoes, veils, tiaras and wedding boxes. Advertising on the site is also paid for in the on-line shop and Ruth has a regular turnover of advertisers on the site. Shoppers add the items they wish to buy to their shopping cart. When they check out, their browsers are redirected to WorldPay's secure transaction server operating 128-bit Secure Socket Layer encryption (SSL).

Visitors to Ruth's Showroom in Pangbourne can also pay for their dresses via the Internet, thus easing Ruth's cashflow as clients tend to pay immediately.

Benefits
Ruth had been running her business for several years before she set up her web site. Typically she spent a large budget on advertising in the top bridal magazines, yellow pages and so on. Since the success of her web site, she has now more than halved her advertising costs, as search engines tend to bring in most of her customers, the others coming from specialist bridal magazines.

Ruth Paul can be contacted on +44 118 9842755 or at
ruth@1stcallforweddings.co.uk