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

Cheers,
Alison

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

Cheers,
Alison

• 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!

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.

He has actually already started creating it and we have found that a lot of our users are deciding to create wedding maps earlier in the planning process. We think this is a great use of the wedding map because it allows you to plot all of your reception and ceremony venues in consideration, upload photos of each from your site visits and help decide which locations to ultimately choose. After you make your venue decisions, you can add in restaurants, hotel accommodations and other markers that make your wedding map unique to you. We encourage you to start creating your wedding map soon after your engagement!

We are also please to make the following announcements:

1) We have finalized a partnership with Brides.com to integrate wedding maps into Brides.com Wedding Websites. Now, when you create a wedding website with Brides.com, you will receive a free premium version of our wedding maps. The program will be live at the end of the month, so please check it out at www.brides.com.

2) We have hired a third member of the team. Alison Gursky is a newlywed in the SF Bay Area. She is going to be our eyes and ears on the street and will be interacting with other newlyweds, brides and vendors to get feedback on our product and provide recommendations for site enhancements/better user experience. We are excited to leverage her passion and enthusiasm for the industry to help grow our brand!

As we head into the New Year, we continue to make enhancements to the site to improve user experience and pretty soon we will have some new functionality in place that will aim to facilitate communication between brides, vendors and guests at the local level. Look for this functionality coming soon!

Warm wishes for a blissful year with family, friends and fiance’s!

Julie

As a former bride and someone who has spent years in the industry, I know that brides want to get ideas and inspiration from other like-minded brides. The single most important thing I used to plan my wedding was a portfolio from a friend of a friend who was married at the same venue that I chose. I took her notes and ideas on vendors and I used them to plan our perfect day. Today, brides who have been married at the same venue are creating networks to share ideas and learn from each other. Our wedding is one of the biggest days in our life- a time where all of our family and friends come together- and we do want it to go off without a hitch!

So, Wedding Mapper is striving to have the richest and most comprehensive collection of real weddings that you can use to get ideas to plan your own wedding. When it’s your turn to make your wedding plans, create a map to share with your guests. Your guests will absolutely thank you for it! And then, you too can publish your map and help future brides with insider secrets. Happy planning!

Julie

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!

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!

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.