The brief
Michelle’s previous WordPress website had done well for its time, but was starting to show signs of age. Slow page loading due to older, less efficient code and excessive plugins. Confusing content management. Broken functionality after a hosting move.
As time progressed, so had Michelle’s business. Bringing together an alliance of companies to work on creating a more sustainable, environmentally conscious wedding industry. Michelle was looking for a more professional website, as well as to remove the pain points and have something that enabled more confident editing of content.
With a shared vision of bringing a low carbon web design and build to life, this task was a very enjoyable one.
Playful use of colour blocking, shapes and overlaps keep the eye engaged as you scroll
The outcome
Brand-led, low carbon design
The Sustainable Wedding Alliance already had an established brand, including a logo and mark, suite of colours, typography, and more recently tone of voice and copywriting.
The ground work was there ready to utilised. My job in the design was to re-imagine the website, with new user journeys, layouts, and subtle tweaks to the typography. To help bring the brand to life again on the web whilst retaining a familiarity for the alliance.
Balancing aesthetics, energy and page load
One of the challenges for the website was the typography. Michelle was keen to tweak things, but retain a similar feel. Something professional, but not uptight.
From a low-carbon and performance perspective, I was keen to see how the aesthetic qualities of the fonts could be managed against the number of variants needed. For example, only loading the characters that were required within the font files. Additionally loading files from the local server as much as possible, with caching, rather than loading from an external source.
A number of block layouts keeps the content at the forefront of the design
The balance was to retain the title font, The Seasons, which needed to be loaded from Adobe fonts for licensing and cost reasons. This was coupled with a lovely sans serif, Tenor Sans, which Michelle could use for free both on the website and within Canva where social assets were being created.
With some careful subsetting and use of modern formats, the typography balanced loading performance and visual appeal.
Leading the design with typography and colour had an additional benefit. The pages didn’t need to rely on heavy imagery, meaning every page could be that much lighter.
Easy, worry-free content uploading
I often have clients tell me that they don’t add content to their current website because they are worried about the results. Such as what it will look like compared to the admin version. Or that they don’t have time to upload content, as the interface is too confusing and they overthink design decisions simply because they are available to them.
There is often a solution. Simplicity. Stripping back the admin interface to plain text, images, data inputs, and basic text editors. Show the correct fonts, but leave out colours, layouts or other confusing options like padding. This lets people focus on the words and images themselves. Not what they will look like on the page.
The website handles the styling for you. The confidence grows. The results often speak for themselves.
CMS options allow for subtle changes in the typography in key areas of focus, such as the leading title, whilst ensuring solid semantic hierarchy
The results
The Sustainable Wedding Alliance website is now much lighter. Around 95% lighter on initial page load across the site. There are also less pages overall, as well as a very small number of images. So the server impact is also slimmer, due to less data being stored, requested and retrieved.
The website loads incredibly fast. With most pages weighing under 200Kb, around 93% less than the average web page load in 2026.
The website is running on the low-carbon French power grid, in a very high performance data centre in Paris. The data centre has a high Power Usage Effectiveness rating, low use of water, and soon positive use of the heat generated to warm homes and community spaces.
No AI was used in the design or build of the website. There is only lightweight, privacy-first analytics running to assist in basic knowledge of page views and to help with the digital carbon impact report measurements.