It’s been an incredible seven years…..

Polka Dot Bride throughout the years

Almost seven years ago I started Polka Dot Bride and today we’re thrilled beyond belief to be launching our fifth version of the site.

My plan this year was to revamp and relaunch and I think we just scraped it in! I couldn’t be more excited to show off the hard work of the incredible Prue of Gigi & Lulu who designed every element and Anthony and Felicity of Metrix Operations who developed everything and made the wheels turn. We have all spent countless hours sending PDFs back and forth, hours deciding which links go where, redesigning every element and checking items off seemingly endless to do lists.

Our goal with this design was to clean up the navigation and dig out areas of the site that have been hidden (for instance, that job board we launched back in 2010? You can now find it easily in our right sidebar, hooray!)

Here’s just some of our new features and pieces that I love!

We introduced a fun slider across the top of the site that will be showcasing all the latest and greatest- like our Vendor Of The Week, posts we adore and links to our favourite pages – speaking of make sure you’re signed up to the Polka Dot Circle newsletter! Monthly, we send out a wedding information packed newsletter with all kinds of DIYs, sneak peeks at upcoming content, tips and tricks from experts and of course shopping tips!

Don’t forget to check out our newly revamped job board too if you’re looking for a job in the industry or looking for the perfect star for your team!

As I said earlier, cleaning up our navigation was our priority, so we have two basic menus to help you figure out where to go (plus all our social media links so you can follow us all over the web!) both located at the top of the site.

You can easily click through to our Inspired Weddings, events calender, competitions and even the wedding directory!

Speaking of our inspired weddings, it had a freshen up and you can easily filter weddings by style, location and even colour

We love social media, so we made sharing easy and pretty by including easy buttons so you can share around the posts you love.

We added fun tabs down the side (object in this image may not be as it appears, it’s actually vertical!) so you can flip through the blogs quickly and easily to find what you’re looking for.

You can easily see the latest on each specialty blog by this nifty footer we created- it shows the last four posts on each site and you can head anywhere in one click

Polka Dot Groom our old friend has grown up a little with this dark new look.

We even made over Ms Polka Dot’s Directory- again  helping you to find vendors you love quickly and easily!

Look on the vendors profile pages to find their social media accounts (Saturdays on instagram are my favourite days for following, so many beautiful images!)

You can even see the vendors’ features on Polka Dot Bride at the bottom of their listing page!

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We’ve tweaked a bunch of little features too – hover over any image to see our new pin it button which allows you to pin images directly to Pinterest!

This nifty little login dropdown at the top right of the site is the place to head if you’re a Polka Dot Bride advertiser looking for your dashboard, looking for the submissions dashboard or wanting to contribute a post to the specialty sites!

We have created many more features (with a few yet to launch, we’re tweaking as we speak) I am well and truly ready to celebrate with bubbles (luckily we get to do that for our Christmas party this week!) so I would love to hear what you think!

None of what we do is possible without your incredible support, your notes, your emails and your cheers from the sidelines. For each and every person who reads Polka Dot Bride we are grateful. I can’t wait to dive into 2014 with you!

The post Welcome To Polka Dot Bride 5.0 appeared first on Polka Dot Bride.

Want More? Check Out These Posts: Welcome To Polka Dot Bride 4.0 Polka Dot Bride Unveils Ms Polka Dot’s Directory It’s Polka Dot Bride’s 5th Birthday!