We are excited to share our glowing endorsement from wedding expert and author, Sharon Naylor. Sharon used Wedding Mapper for her own wedding and was so happy with the experience that she recommended us in her high profile blog http://sharonnaylorweddings.blogspot.com/search?q=WeddingMapper.com and included this endorsement in the 3^rd edition of her book ‘1001 Ways to Save Money and Still Have a Dazzling Wedding’ (due out in 2009):

“As a wedding author, I’ve recommended the top websites to my readers in all of my 35 wedding books, and when it came time to planning my own wedding, I knew my groom was going to LOVE working on the wedding maps with me. We opened up WeddingMapper.com, and we had a fantastic time entering our ceremony and reception site, the hotels for our guests, our own home for the rehearsal dinner — and it was so easy and efficient, with easy sends to our friends and family, easy updates, and the very fun attraction of satellite view which we and our guests loved! WeddingMapper saved us a ton of time (and paper!), getting our locations and easy To-and-From directions to our far-flung guests in record time. I highly recommend WeddingMapper to every bride and groom! You’ll love working on this together!” — Sharon Naylor, wedding expert and author of 35 wedding books, www.sharonnaylor.net

Sharon has written 35 wedding books that can be found online at her site, www.sharonnaylor.net.

Happy Mapping!

Alison

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

The response to our Do-It-Yourself Wedding Map Guides has been amazing.  And because of this we decided to add more icons to our free icon bank. 

If you haven’t checked them out you should definitely take a look http://www.weddingmapper.com/diy/wedding_map. 

Happy Mapping!

Alison

The buzz from brides is Do – It – Yourself (DIY).  Brides are DIY’ing everything from Save the Dates and invitations to hotel gift boxes and favors all in the name of cutting costs and putting a personal touch on their wedding.  We currently offer an inexpensive and convenient way to get a professionally done map to print for invitations via Distinctive Directions (http://www.distinctivedirections.com/), but we wanted to support the DIY community as well.   We are happy to add our new DIY Wedding Map Guide to the site.  This guide will give you step-by-step instructions on how to turn your already fabulous WeddingMapper map into a beautiful customized map that you can include in your invitations and hotel gift bags.  For all of you “computer challenged” brides, don’t worry, you only need to use WeddingMapper.com and Microsoft Word.  There are five different maps to choose from based on your style, skill level, and time frame.  And the best part is it’s FREE! Follow the link below to check out the new DIY Wedding Map Guide http://www.weddingmapper.com/DIY/wedding_map.
 

Happy Mapping!

Alison

Happy 2008! We are excited for the start of a new year and have been hearing all over the place that engagements over the holidays are at an all time high. In fact, Jared is actually part of those stats as he decided to pop the question to his girlfriend, now fiance (still not quite rolling off his tongue!) on a a romantic snowy night in Boston. We look forward to seeing his wedding map!

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

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.

What do you think of our new look?! We’ve spent months on a new design that better exposes all of the great real wedding content that you’ve created over the past year!

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

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!