Wedding Mapper Blog

We’ve worked it out with Distinctive Directions to extend their 10% offer indefinitely. As suspected, Distinctive Directions was able to shave a little time off of their process when people provided a Wedding Mapper map.

They’ve agreed to transfer this savings back to you, reducing their already low prices even further.

So now, when you provide Distinctive Directions with your completed Wedding Mapper map they will give you a 10% discount and will take your map:

and turn it into this:

We’ve decided to experiment with image ads. The text ads are simply too subtle and are not getting clicked on enough. We will still be using a lot of text ads, though, to see if the difference is worth the added annoyance.

I hope this does not annoy people too much; we tried to keep it as tasteful as possible. If you do find it too annoying we will always have the extremely inexpensive option to remove the ads for just $9.95, which is probably the least expensive price you will pay for anything at your wedding.

If you are a local wedding vendor then you may want to sign up to be notified of the new services we are working on. The new service will make it easier for you to leverage the local nature of Wedding Mapper and promote your services.

The service will be great for all types of local vendors including, but not limited to:

• Florists
• DJs
• Hotels
• Caterers
• Wedding Planners/Coordinators
• Restaurants
• etc

We aren’t exactly sure when the new service will go live, it will be a few months at the very least. To sign up for notification of the new service click here.

Important: If you are using Wedding Mapper to map out your wedding rest assured that nothing will change for you when the new service launches. We will never give out your email address and will not be changing the map creating experience or map viewing experience at all.

I’m not sure if everyone realizes this, but we dropped the price to remove the ads from your wedding map to just $9.95. We’ve come up with some other ideas for generating revenue and want to make sure everyone has a great experience with the product. So if you wanted to remove the ads from your map, but were a little hesitant about the price hopefully this new price will ease the indecision.

In the last few days I’ve come across one question and one comment regarding the legitimacy of Wedding Mapper:

Via an email:

One of my friends told me that shortly before the date of the wedding you send out a notice (via e-mail) that you have to subscribe for whatever fee there is or your personal wedding map will be deleted? Is this true?

Via Life Hacker:

I hate to bring in the negatives, but I’ve heard from a friend as well as my fiancee (both of whom use theknot) that unscrupulous venders who know who you are and who your vendors are, will call on your behalf, cancel your services, and then call you at the last minute when you’re desperate for whatever service they cancelled.

You end up screwed, paying more, and having to find an alternative … or doing without.

I’m not trying to be alarmist, and I’m certainly not saying don’t use these services. I’m just urging caution and preaching awareness. Nobody wants to have to deal with that sort of thing on their big day.

I realize that there are probably a number of unscrupulous wedding-related websites out there that are going to take advantage of you a day or two before your wedding, but Wedding Mapper is not one of them. I’m not 100% sure how to communicate this to people. Maybe it is just a matter of time. You have my word, though, that we are not here to rip you off. I am dedicated to making Wedding Mapper one of the best resources available for people who are getting married.

If anyone has any idea about how I can make people feel more comfortable with using Wedding Mapper I would love to hear them!

Welcome to Wedding Mapper !

We’ve decided to start this blog in order to inform people about Wedding Mapper. We’ve got lots of great ideas about where to take Wedding Mapper and how to make it an extremely useful site for people who are getting married. We’ll be using this blog to update people on our progress.

You can read all about Wedding Mapper on the about page, but I’ll provide some extra details here. Basically I’ve been developing another mapping application, CommunityWalk, which is a much more generic mapping application, for almost 2 years now. Over that time I’ve learned a great deal about how people use the application and what types of maps people create. This is where the inspiration for Wedding Mapper came from. People were using CommunityWalk to map out their weddings, and I realized that I could provide a much better interface for mapping out your wedding than CommunityWalk.

So I took the opportunity to take what I had learned from CommunityWalk and build Wedding Mapper. I’ve had (and continue to have) the help of some great people, including Lauren Sardina (moral support and marketing help), Chris Jehle (administrative and financial help), Arena Reed (design), Anne Russell (icons), Pivotal Labs (engineering help and a place to work), and Commerce.net (financing and great advice).

I quietly launched Wedding Mapper just before heading back to Boston to see my family for Christmas and started spreading the word about it just last week. On Sunday Google Maps Mania wrote the first article about it. Life Hacker quickly followed and then Wedding Mapper appeared on the del.icio.us front page. This attention was enough to get the word out and it got picked up by a number of blogs, including WeddingBee and a number of other wedding related blogs. There’s still a lot of work to be done getting the word out to people who are getting married, but this was a good start and the reaction so far has been fantastic.

Wedding Mapper is going to continue to grow and improve, so stay tuned to this blog and help me get the word out!