Planning a wedding can be complicated. Not only are there many vendors, choices, and opinions to decide among, but there are also so many moving parts to keep track of. And when you add the complexity of many couples’ families today (step parents, half brothers, family feuds) it seems as though planning a wedding is a complex game of Tetris.

To help ease the frustration with tracking all of your wedding details, Wedding Mapper has just launched its Guest Manager. This new tool, currently in beta, not only allows you to manage your RSVP’s (did Aunt Sally say she can come to the Welcome Dinner but can’t come to the Farewell Breakfast, or the vice versa?) but it also helps to track your guests’ meal selection, address information, gifts received AND seating arrangements per event.

Just when you thought creating a seating chart was only a matter of picking tables and placing guests at each table per your desired room layout, Wedding Mapper has stepped in and has accounted for the stress of managing family altercations. When you add a guest to your Guest Manager you can place parameters around who else they MUST and CANNOT sit with (World War III may erupt if Uncle John and Aunt Linda sit at the same table)! Then when you’re creating your seating chart, it will place guests together if you have requested that (which means faster seating!) and will remind you if, by accident, you seat John and Linda together. We’re looking out for you!

The flow among all the content within the Guest Manager allows for an easy and fun way to track all the content around your guests. We know your wedding planning process can be stressful, so we’re doing all we can to help organize your planning – so you don’t have to.

Cheers,
Alison
Wedding Mapper

We just started tweeting about our favorite weddings, vendors and venues from around the world. Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/weddingmapper

Cheers,
Alison

Our newly designed website has launched and is getting glowing reviews! The new site has a fresh color scheme, better navigation, local photo galleries and much more. We’ve made it easier for engaged couples to connect with other engaged couples, newly married couples, and vendors and venues in thousands of local areas world wide.

If you haven’t checked out the new Wedding Mapper, you should definitely take a peek!!

Cheers,
Alison

Now couples can create a free Wedding Map and use our new Vendor Manager tool.  Throw that spreadsheet away and keep all of your venue and vendor information in one place.  The Vendor Manager tool will allow couples to:

• Get budget recommendations
• Send “Information Requests” to local vendors and receive more information about their services
• Manage vendor contact and payment information
• Schedule and track vendor payments
• View budget and payment reports
• Set reminders and create To Do lists

More great tools are coming soon!

Wedding Mapper has created a one-of-a-kind advertising system that allows vendors to reach only the customers that they want at a fraction of the price that they would pay on other sites.

Most sites only allow vendors to advertise in a geographic region such as “Northern California” and will charge hundreds of dollars a month, even though most of the people that view their advertisement are not looking for services in their specific local area. Wedding Mapper allows vendors to reach customers in over 10,000 individual cities and towns around the world, allowing them to target their message only to those people that are looking for services in the specific cities and towns that they serve.

We provide vendors with statistics about each local area so that they can tell how many people will view their ad, allowing them to make informed decisions about where to advertise.

The best part is that each ad costs as little as $1 for a 2 week time period. Finally they’ll be able to reach the customers that they want, when they want, at an affordable price!

Get started by creating a free vendor account.

Now you can connect with other couples in your area using our new Local Message Boards. Ask questions about a local photographer or DJ, swap ideas about area hotels or transportation, and share advice about the best time of year to get married or which flowers are locally grown and in season.

Click here to go to your local message boards.

Happy Chatting!

Alison

You asked for it and here they are! We have added two new sets of icons for couples to use on their Wedding Map.

Bubble Icon Set

Cut-out Icon Set

Enjoy!

Alison

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’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.