We just received this quote from a recently-married bride:

“This is a great website.  I found it so easy to use…even my not so computer savy mom figured it all out.  Thanks for saving me hundreds of dollars for printed maps in my invitaitons!”

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make Wedding Mapper as intuitive and easy to use as possible, so it’s always great to hear that our efforts are paying off.

You can read more quotes from couples that have used Wedding Mapper in our “What People Are Saying” page.

We’ve got some big news to announce. We’re growing the team!

Julie King has joined the Wedding Mapper team. She comes from the WeddingChannel.com where she spent 6 years as the Director of National Sales. She’s going to help us grow our business through specific partnerships throughout the industry.

This has serious implications on our current business. It means that we no longer have to rely on advertising displayed on your wedding map as part of our business model. So we’ve removed all advertising from the wedding maps. Now you can create a wedding map to share with your guests for free and it will not display any advertisements. We think it makes the product that much better and we’re excited to have Julie on board so that we can afford to improve the solution in this way!

You can spend a lot of time trying to find the best venue for your wedding. Looking for the right chapel for your ceremony or reception hall can be very time consuming. Not to mention the time trying to pick out the best hotels in the area.

Well we were thinking through this problem and we realized that we are sitting on an enormous amount of information about which venues to use in your wedding, which hotels to pick, which restaurants and attractions to recommend to visitors, etc. So we figured maybe we should publish this information and help people plan their weddings.

Of course we realized that people may not want to publish their wedding information, so we decided to put a few stipulations on it. For one, we wait a month after the wedding before we publish a map. We also make all maps anonymous by default and allow people to easily opt out. So far people have responded fantastically, gladly publishing their wedding maps as a resource for future couples.

We don’t have too much data yet, as most of the weddings this year haven’t happened yet, but hopefully over the next few months we’ll have much more data to share. With time it should become a very useful resource for finding all the best wedding venues where ever you are planning your wedding.

Check out all the wedding information, venue information, and vendor information!

And don’t forget to create your own wedding map on Wedding Mapper!

We were just alerted to a nice review of Wedding Mapper on WNBC 4 NYC. To see the clip follow the link below. Wedding Mapper is discussed about 1 minute into the clip (the viewer will show 1:44 left in the clip).

http://video.wnbc.com/player/?id=114283

For me, probably the singly most important thing about a wedding is that the guests have a great time. I went to two weddings this memorial day weekend and both were a great time, going off without a hitch. In both cases, though, I had a ton of time in between planned wedding activities where I had nothing to do.

So I took to wandering the streets and exploring and had a good time of it. In both cases, though, the groom later told me that I should have checked out X, Y, and Z while I was wandering around. Of course it was too late for me to check out X, Y, and Z.

What was interesting was that both weddings used Wedding Mapper to help people get to the hotel, ceremony, and reception, but neither wedding added any nearby attractions, restaurants, bars, etc. to their wedding map. Although the map ended up being extremely helpful (we printed out one page that showed us how to get to everything we needed to get to), it would have been so much better if we they had listed X, Y, and Z so that we could have known more about the area and taken advantage of visiting a place we’ll likely never come back to.

What’s also too bad was that as soon as I told them they should have listed attractions they were slapping their foreheads saying, “Why didn’t we think of that?”. I don’t blame them for missing it, it’s just not part of “what you do for a wedding” yet. Hopefully Wedding Mapper can change that some day!

We’ve received some amazing reviews from the community of wedding websites out there about Wedding Mapper. It has helped us a great deal as we look towards getting this business off the ground. So we got to thinking: how can we encourage people to tell others about Wedding Mapper and how can we better reward them for helping us make this website a success?

After some digging around we came across a few services that facilitate affiliate programs for other websites. They would allow us to set up a program for all of the wedding websites and blogs out there to create a link that would send people to Wedding Mapper. Then, if anyone they refer to Wedding Mapper pays to upgrade their account we would share 50% of the sale with the referrer.

We’re hoping that this could be a great way for all of the websites and blogs out there that write about weddings, including websites for photographers, wedding planners, etc. to make money for referring a great product to their readers and customers. Your readers and customers will be very grateful to you for pointing out a useful tool that makes their wedding planning process easier!

Getting started with these programs is not cheap, so we’d like to figure out if anyone would be interested in participating in this before we dive in completely. So if you would be interested in acting as a Wedding Mapper Affiliate please email us at affiliate@weddingmapper.com and don’t forget to include your name and the url for your website.

We’re starting to roll out some features associated with Wedding Mapper’s next stage of development. With so many thousands of great wedding maps we thought it would be a great idea to publish these maps after the wedding has already taken place so that future engaged couples can view wedding maps in their area to help them plan their wedding.

We wanted to respect the privacy of anyone using Wedding Mapper, though, so any couple that would rather not have their wedding map published is free to make it private, removing it completely from this part of the site. By default we’re making all the wedding maps anonymous, removing the names of the couple, date of the wedding, and all descriptions that have names or dates in them. Any couple that feels comfortable sharing more information with people can choose to do so, and their wedding map will show up first when people are looking in a specific area as it will likely be more informative than other, anonymous wedding maps.

So far the response from the community of engaged couples using Wedding Mapper has been great. Less than 1% of couples have chosen to keep their maps private. We’ve also received a number of emails from people saying that they wish this had been available when they were planning their wedding and they are happy to have their wedding map published now that their wedding has already taken place. We agree; we think it’s going to be a great resource for engaged couples who are trying to figure out where to have their ceremony or which hotels to use, etc.

We’re working on the interface for exploring these wedding maps. In the meantime we’ve put together a raw list of all publishable wedding maps (where the wedding has already taken place and we have permission to publish the map) in the beginnings of the wedding planning section of Wedding Mapper.

Wedding Mapper has been receiving some press recently promoting the site as a great tool for planning a destination wedding. Although the press is very helpful for getting the word out about Wedding Mapper, it’s too bad that the focus is on destination weddings. Almost every wedding these days is a destination wedding for your guests.

Unless all of your family and guests live in the same town as your wedding, then your wedding is a destination wedding for your family and friends. Even if your guests live in the same town as your wedding then Wedding Mapper is a great opportunity to tell people what you love about the area and why it is special to you.

So, although Wedding Mapper can be particularly useful for true destination weddings, it can also be extremely useful for local weddings where people may be coming from out of town or where people may just appreciate seeing a place that is special to you through your eyes!

We didn’t even realize it at the time, but a few days ago we passed the 10,000 registered wedding maps mark. Since you don’t have to register to try out Wedding Mapper this means that over 10,000 engaged couples have found Wedding Mapper useful enough to register for the site over the past 3 months since our launch. A significant portion of those have liked the site so much that they’ve decided to upgrade their accounts as well.

This is just the beginning and we’ve got some great plans in mind to improve the site, but it’s a great start!

We get a lot of comments from people saying how they would have loved to use Wedding Mapper to create a map of their wedding if they’d only known about it earlier. Many of these people will not be getting married for months, but they’ve already hired a professional designer or spent hours creating their wedding map by hand to include in their invitations.

Although it is unfortunate that they were not able to save themselves time and money by using Wedding Mapper from the start, they can certainly still benefit from creating a wedding map with Wedding Mapper. When we describe to them how they can still use they almost always end up creating a map and thanking us for the suggestions. So I figure it was time to write a short article about how to get the most out of Wedding Mapper, even if you already have a printed wedding map.

1. An online map of your wedding can help your out of town guests plan their trip more effectively. They’ll be able to easily see where the airport, hotels, reception, and ceremony are, making it easier for them to make decisions about where to stay.
2. Your Wedding Mapper map allows your our of town guests to become familiar with the area before they arrive. I’ve been to two weddings in the past few weeks and both times I was completely unfamiliar with the immediate area around the hotel (even though I lived close by). Had either couple created a map of their wedding and included some highlights in the area I would have known where to explore and wouldn’t have spent all my time just hanging out at the hotel.
3. A Wedding Mapper map gives you a great opportunity to let people know why you decided to get married in this specific place. It may be special to you because it is where you met, or where you grew up, or simply a place that both of you have wanted to travel to for some time. What ever the reason, use your wedding map to describe this special place to people and help them get excited about coming to your wedding. Even if they are local, you can tell them things about this place and how it relates to you and your fiancee that they probably did not know.
4. Your guests, photographer, caterer, etc. can easily get directions to any number of places they need to go during your wedding. People may be flying in, staying at hotels, getting their nails done or pictures taken some place. Nothing is more convenient for them than an online map of the wedding area that they can use to get directions.

There are numerous other benefits of create a map of your wedding online with Wedding Mapper, not the least of which is saving on custom design work by a professional designer. Still if you’ve already gone to the trouble of creating a printed map of your wedding hopefully this advice will prevent you from dismissing Wedding Mapper without giving it a little thought. It is free and very easy to use and can really benefit your guests, your vendors, and yourself come your big day!