Cue the marriage puns: Today Nearlyweds announces that we are tying the knot with OneWed.com. You can read the full text of the press release to get the official take.

Let me provide a little more color from behind the scenes though, a look at what really makes us tick.

Allow me to get philosophical first. We love weddings, really love them, and not just because they are exciting and fun, but because they are a moral good. Great marriages make for strong families. Strong families have an extraordinary ability to impact the world around them, do social good, and fundamentally shape the next generation. And weddings are a celebration not just the love of two, but of all that is yet to come in their marriage. This sense of purpose drives what we do.

When we talk with engaged couples, especially brides, what we hear is that the wedding becomes a giant exercise in event planning. A giant stressful exercise in event planning. Couples have to make a lot of decisions in a short period of time, prioritization is difficult, and the overwhelming options can be paralyzing. Of course there is still a lot about the planning process that is really fun, that is exciting, that is part of the celebration and the journey.

Our goal all along has been to help couples rescue their wedding from event planning mania and to celebrate the marriage. Wedding websites were our first step because they bring the families together (through stories, photos, etc.) before the wedding and help the couple efficiently communicate with guests, tally RSVPs electronically, and so on.

OneWed is a huge leap forward for us in our vision. They have the same ethos of honest, truthful advice. To borrow a line from the press release: “[Onewed has a] growing loyal network of exceptional local wedding businesses to create practical, honest, socially driven wedding content and tools to simplify the wedding planning process for engaged couples.”

So much more to come.

John Scrofano
CEO

We’re addicted to the stream that shows us custom domain names recently bought for Nearlyweds sites. Most are classic (which is cool), but some are really hilarious or outrageous. Our favorite this week was:
www.chickennuggetsparks.com

Yep – you read that right. So great! We love it when people are having fun with their sites. Briana (the bride) even blogged that she gets a good lol out of it every time she types it in.

So – we were thinking it would be fun to buy the next creative domain for someone. What domain name would you want? Leave it in a comment and we will buy the best one.

Make sure to log into your control panel though and use the domain name tool to look up and see if yours is available. We clearly can’t afford to go buy TomKat from Oprah’s best friend.

Pink Paper, Ink is an amazing design company. Not only do they have a great tagline, Good Karma without Paper Cuts, but they also donate 15 percent of all their proceeds to the fight against breast cancer, use Earth friendly supplies AND have an amazing founder, Veronika Littlefield.

Veronika left the corporate world in 2008 when her mom passed away from breast cancer. Her design background is pretty ingenious. When asked about her experience in design she said,

“Unless you count winning coloring contests in elementary school, I don’t have a design background really.  I come from a very creative family and design had always been a hobby until now.  My was in finance and marketing in Corporate America.  It was always my job to tell the creative people what the client wanted.  To do so effectively, I taught myself the major design software programs and just loved playing around.”

She’s one smart/creative cookie to be able to come up with these beautifully whimsical/quirky designs and not have an extensive design background.

And of course here’s the beautiful matching wedding website:

When I asked what inspires her, Veronika said, “Sometimes it isn’t a visual inspiration, but rather a sensation I want to recreate.  Like the excitement of an upcoming trip and what the destination reminds me of in terms of food, clothing, and atmosphere.” I can really feel this when looking at her designs. This design makes me think about an upcoming trip to a really fun yet beautiful vineyard:

This one makes me think of a trip to Aspen or Colorado in the summer:

When asked what Pink Paper, Ink’s typical bride is like, Veronika said she doesn’t get to know them as much as she’d like due to the online nature of her business. She does know they are busy or maybe just practical because their new mailing service is very popular. (This is the part you really need to read brides and grooms) Their mailing service includes: printing of all addresses, assembly, hand-stamping AND POSTAGE. This part takes soooo much time and I would definitely suggest it to all of you ladies and gents out there.

We are so happy to welcome Pink Paper, Ink to Nearlyweds and know that you will LOVE their amazing designs!

{Rachael}

We’re so excited to introduce you to Samantha Chu, the mastermind behind Papermints, and their wonderful wedding invitations. She started as most of us do with a love of crafting from a young age. Her creativity eventually lead to a degree in Fine Arts from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a career as a book and magazine designer until she ventured out to do what she really loves: designing stationery.

When asked what Samantha’s favorite part about designing wedding stationery is, she said, “Personalizing our invitation designs to showcase the couple’s unique style and creativity.  I remember as I was creating my own wedding invitation what a thrill is was to see our names (written as future husband & wife) beautifully printed on a formal invitation.”

Samantha is inspired by clean minimalist design. She loves to peruse architecture and design magazines. This clean design inspiration is very evident in her beautiful, classic stationery seen below.

Here is one of Samantha’s awesome Nearlyweds designs also:

Samantha says the typical Papermints customer is a “budget-savvy bride with a taste for modern simplicity.” She also offers a Real Wedding portion on Papermints for brides to get inspiration from other couples.

Papermints offers three different invitation types:

-For the more classic, traditional bride, their original handmade wedding invitations are created with exquisite textured papers, ribbons and delicate handcrafted materials.

-Papermints’ signature line, the Contempo Collection, is for the modern bride. The contemporary designs are minimalist, bold and stylish, and can be customized with an endless palette of vibrant and soft hues printed on heavyweight smooth or eggshell cotton papers.

-The newest Moda Collection combines clean lines and modern graphics for the trend-conscious urban bride. She’ll love these fresh, original and budget-friendly designs, which can be created on 100% recycled paper for an eco-friendly wedding.

Papermints’ designs are beautiful, modern and classic. We hope you all will welcome Papermints with open arms!

{Rachael}

This is a tough post to write concisely because there is an entire industry built around consultants and professionals who sell expensive services to help get your website ranked at the top of a Google result.  Of course this is much more difficult for someone trying to be #1 selling a very general product like auto insurance, simply because there is more competition.  But even wedding websites can be hard to get to the top of Google result pages, or any other search engine for that matter.

No one can guarantee top rankings, if they could, Google would change their secret algorithm on how they rank sites.  So what are you to do?

There are two simple answers:

1. Create a wedding website with us, Nearlyweds.  Yeah yeah, shameless self promotion it seems – but no – hear us out…there are lots things we do know about how to rank well with Google (we work with those expensive consultants .  One of the most important things you can do to get found is to be linked to, affiliated with, and endorsed by very trusted sites.  Well – that’s us!  You may be thinking, aren’t there even bigger companies out there I could host my site with, so shouldn’t I go with them?  Well, those bigger companies don’t really care if your website gets found in a search engine, so they never expose your site to search engines in a way that will get them ranked.  Quite frankly, most of the big companies just use wedding websites as bait to get you using their other, more profitable products, and so they don’t really spend time thinking about, much less building the things that are important to you.  We obsess over this kind of stuff for you and employ all kinds of great techniques to help get your site ranked.  Proof: even in the past month we have seen traffic to our customer sites increase by 42% because of changes and cool things we are doing to get YOUR WEDDING WEBSITE ranked at the top of results.  It even works if you are using a custom domain name through us!
2. The other thing you can do is simple: ask 2-5 friends who write a blog or have a website to link to your wedding website.  Make an even bigger impact by having them link the words [your first and last name, your fiance's first and last name + wedding website] as the text they link.  Here is an example: Katy Perry and Russel Brand’s Wedding Website.  Because you link the names and the phrase “wedding website” – it tells the search engines that this is the right page when someone types into Google: Katy Perry Wedding Website, for example.

That’s it.  Use us and get a few links to your site from some friends.  It may take a little time, but we have been pretty good at this so far.

Note: We also know that some of you don’t want your wedding website to appear in Google.  That’s totally cool with us.  We think we are the only ones who actually have a whole feature for this.  Simply check a box in your control panel and we drop special software code on your wedding website that blocks all search engines, including Google, from crawling and indexing your site.

According to this Wikipedia entry, historically bridesmaids were a status symbol. The more money you had, the more bridesmaids you had. They have always typically consisted of sisters or good friends. The bride’s family used to always pay for every expense a bridesmaid had, it just recently changed to bridesmaid paying for most (if not all) of their own expenses and the bride giving them a gift of gratitude. Katherine Heigl’s character in 27 Dresses is obviously overboard, so what do you need to do to be a great bridesmaid?

Bottom line is that a bridesmaid is an essential helper before, during and after a wedding. There are the obvious things like helping the bride go to the bathroom at the wedding, attending all the showers and bachelorette parties, making sure she eats the day of the wedding, but here are some overlooked pointers that in my mind are ABSOLUTE MUSTS:

1. Opinions: Before you get into the knitty-gritty of wedding details take a minute to ask the bride how she wants your opinions. Here are some possible ways to approach this: Does she want you to tell her every thought that comes to your mind when she shows you her dream wedding dress? Does she want you to read her expressions and generally agree with whatever she seems to be liking (this was what I wanted, basically just a confidence boost)? Does she want honest opinions no matter what? This step can really help avoid pre-wedding fights or extra stress on the bride.
2. Money: Before you accept the bride’s request to be one of her bridesmaids ask her how much she thinks you’ll be spending. If she’s not sure about the bridesmaid budget, and you don’t have $500 to spend on everything, let her know from the beginning. With the economy as terrible as it is right now you need to approach this gracefully and efficiently. If you are in serious money trouble, you need to tell the bride. If you accept and don’t tell her it can seriously cause unnecessary stress later on when you can’t afford the dress she loves or the Vegas weekend she has her eye on for the bachelorette party. No matter how much you love this bride, it’s not fair to you to spend money you don’t have and it’s not fair to the bride to commit to spending money you don’t have.
3. Speak up: When there is something you aren’t comfortable with. I recently ran into this issue with my good friend Meggan (shout out to double G getting married on 7/16/2010). She picked out a really cute dress from David’s Bridal that I’m excited to wear, but then she chose the shoes. They are beautiful gold heels, but they are 4 inch heels. I don’t do heels, I just can’t. I’ve tried, I have terrible balance, and if I fall at her wedding I will die! I felt terrible about this. Meggan is super cute and such a great friend that I was just afraid to bring it up because I didn’t want to upset her. Unfortunately I waited too long and all the other bridesmaids bought the shoes. Once I talked to her she couldn’t change the shoes obviously, so she decided I could just wear the heels in pictures and really similar flat sandals for the ceremony and the rest of the day. Thanks Megg!
4. Don’t talk about yourself too much: This is the brides one and only wedding (hopefully). She wants your opinions on HER wedding, not what you want for your own wedding. I don’t care if you’re getting married two days after her. Here’s a perfect example of what NOT to do. Bride: “I really want a dress that is ivory and covered in lace.” Bridesmaid: “Oh me too, I love lace, I can’t wait to get married.” Here’s an example of what you SHOULD do: Bride: “I really want a dress that is ivory and covered in lace.” Bridesmaid: “Oh that is so you, it will be perfect!”
5. Go to the maid of honor whenever possible: If you have questions that you think the MOH can answer, go to her if possible. It is awesome if the bride keeps everyone up to the minute with information, but if not ask the MOH because most likely if you have a question the other Bridesmaids do too.

So in general you really need to communicate with the bride in the beginning, ask her how you can help, what she needs from you and be honest about what you can do up front. I hope this helps bridesmaids and brides as they prepare for the big day! Don’t worry all you amazing bridesmaids out there who are thinking “Yeah I would totally love to help if my friend weren’t such a crazy bridezilla!” I’m going to start working on a “How to Be a Good Bride” post soon so keep checking back for that.

{Rachael}

There is a lot of writing that goes on about this “digital generation” of engaged couples. So being a (not so secret) bunch of geeks and in the business of selling gorgeous wedding websites (precisely to these lovely, beautiful, wonderful, we love you, choose us!, couples), we decided to collect some mad filthy DATA! (filthy is used by high school kids to mean “awesome”, for those of you not in the know).

This is just the first post in a series from thousands of tweets and facebook posts (Rowfeeder Rocks) related to weddings. Lots of fun information to come on things like cakes, dresses, and WIC.  Taking requests too…

Let’s dig in to our first data set: Peeps tweeting #wedding 12,616 times over the course of a month (mid May-mid June 2010). Data first, funny videos at the end of the post

So who is tweeting about #weddings?

Turns out, it’s us, vendors and blogs for the most part.

What are people talking about?

Mostly themselves…but that’s really true of all of twitter, so I can’t be harsh. Plus, I don’t know anything more interesting in the whole world than what I am thinking about right now; I’m guessing you can relate.

• 77.2% of posts had a URL in them, so they were tweeting about content on the web
• Over 65% of theses urls were content that was their own
• Of these urls, the 5 most retweeted were spammy Etsy or Zazzle stores trying to promote their wedding related jewelry.
• Most legitimate retweeted URLs:
  • Video production company that produces “pre-wedding videos” for couples. This url, combined with three others was tweeted over 60 times. The video isn’t like the amazing Jeff and Erin’s Epic Wedding Trailer (which if you haven’t seen, you must), but seriously, what is?!? But it shows you that people are really interested in the story of the couple.
  • SLR Lounge, a digital photography blog (presumably that wedding photographers fancy)
  • OfcourseIdo.com – Like an ezine articles for weddings

Again, you can see it’s mostly self promotion within the wedding industry.

Now, Let’s check out some smexy word density (articles removed, #wedding removed):

Sorry Love, our wedding is about our albums albums albums and vintage jewelry we found on etsy from great designers designers related to my family.

And what about the “Top Tweeters”?

Schnikes! Over 10% of tweets with #wedding came from 3 ADHD tweeters.

• @Yourweddinglive is a UK website that will stream your wedding live on the internet.  Their site doesn’t tell you they do live tweet transcription, but their tweet volume would indicate this much.  Who knows if this business will survive long term, but there is at least one company devoted wholly to live streaming weddings – super interesting.
• @EventSavvy seems like a lovely Colorado event planner named Daisy Grau that tweets a lot about celebrity weddings.
• @MyWeddingNews: well they just retweet wedding related news, who woulda thunk ?!?

Again – all vendor/media folks.

Most Followed people tweeting about #weddings?

• Jeanette Joy Fisher, a TLC personality that does house flipping.
• Swissmiss – a fabulous Swiss designer living and blogging from NYC
• MSNBC – reporting on why you should have a prenuptial agreement
• Penguin Group – plugging a new novel of theirs about a bride
• Calvin Lee – a self proclaimed “media ho” with tons of followers that tweeted about his dinner from a wedding. It might have been delicious, but looks an awful lot like different colored squid.
• Pye – A very popular wedding photographer from LA who loves to rock out the HDR and has slightly creepy avatar (portfolio looks great though)

What’s the moral of this story?

Us, wedding professionals, combined with spammers dominate the volume of tweets related to weddings. But that’s ok, as long people are eyes wide open about it. We [Nearlyweds] use twitter primarily to engage with fabulous stationery designers and lure them into our super awesome system where they can create matching wedding websites for brides. We also use Twitter in some novel ways to engage with and acquire new customers (that we are keeping to ourselves for the moment) that has been very successful. But primarily, Twitter seems to be a B2B exercise in the wedding industry…which is great. If you are a new wedding vendor to the biz, just don’t wet your pants or bet your business on finding all your customers via Twitter. But you can find lots of vendors and bloggers on twitter.

Now for the funny videos:

Best wedding videos that were tweeted (imho):

• Wedding Party Falling into a Lake
• Robot Presiding over Japanese Wedding (Oh dear)
• Proposal in Washington Square Park (Fun, but long)

And a special thanks to our boyz at Rowfeeder who helped us track tweets and facebook posts we then analyzed.

We love all of our designers, but Merrymint Designs has been amazing. They signed up on Nearlyweds about a week ago and already have several AWESOME designs AND already posted a link on their homepage. The wonderful ladies of Merrymint Designs are a dream to work with!

These are the geniuses behind Merrymint Designs, identical twin sisters, Cheryl and Sherie LaPrade.

When asked to give a brief statement about their store including what makes them different, this was their response:

“We really enjoy making light-hearted, fun, and beautiful designs that the modern bride would enjoy and hold very tightly to the belief that our brides should not have to pay a fortune for a beautiful design =)  We both have a quirky sense of humor and we believe in always putting our brides (& grooms!) first and will bend over backwards, if necessary, to help them out!”

So not only are they smart, savvy business women with a nack for customer service they also have an eye for beautiful design! Here are some of examples:

Wed-site:

Matching Invitations:

Wed-site:

Matching Invitations:

They have more designs on Nearlyweds that are just as beautiful and even more wedding invitations on their site that will knock your socks off. I personally hope their next wed-site will be made to match this little beauty:

We hope you all will show Merrymint Designs some love!

{Rachael}

Hey SMP readers – we picked our winner to our contest randomly (by using a fancy random number generator in excel – I love excel); and a big Congratulations Maribel E for winning. This video is for everyone though, not just Maribel. Thanks for entering everyone!

Maribel – we will contact you and make sure you get some massively awesome huge cupcake pans, amongst other great baking things.

Candy buffets or bars: they are at tons of weddings now-a-days. How do you do it? Is there a budget friendly way? Why do it, should it be your favor? Read on as I hopefully answer your questions!

Candy buffets are typically used as the wedding favor. They can be placed anywhere from right next to the cake, in an entry/exit area, near a buffet or near a coffee bar. They are one of the most versatile decorations/favors you can have at your wedding. I highly suggest them, and think they really make guests happy.

There are several ways to make your candy buffet happen. If you have a wedding planner you can probably rent the jars from them. I would highly recommend that. Most wedding planners come by these things at previous weddings. A bride will buy a bunch of stuff they don’t need after the wedding and instead of taking them home the bride will tell the wedding planner to take whatever they want and throw away the rest. Renting them from your wedding planner is the most budget friendly way to make the candy bar happen. After doing a quick Google search for apothecary jars I found these on Sears.com for $49.99 if you choose to buy your own. You can also find all sorts of smaller cheaper jars on Amazon.

Next comes the candy. That’s where things can get expensive depending on what you want. I’ve seen jars full of Starbursts and easily attainable candy from a grocery store, but I’ve also seen special ordered one color candy to match wedding colors. Here’s some great candy that looks amazing. I got all of these from www.candyfavorites.com.

Sixlets: HUGE hit at the last wedding I worked at.

Rock Candy: Looks amazing and tastes wonderful!

Jelly Bellys in any color or flavor you want. This is pear, AKA my favorite flavor, but my mom hates it.

Really you can do anything you want. Let’s say you only want blue and brown M&M’s you can either order them, or have a separating party with bridesmaids (wearing gloves) where all you do is separate the colors.

In total for a candy buffet you will need:

1. Jars
2. Scoops/spoons
3. Something to put them in like a plastic bag or Chinese food takeout box
4. A place to keep the extra candy to refill throughout the night

Another option is to go to get a candy buffet vendor to do everything for you. This is great for the bride who’s not necessarily on a tight budget. They can cost about as much as the cake if you go this rout. I just found one that is a local to Seattle company called My Candy Buffet and their prices are $4-$5 per serving.

Now that the logistics of how to find the goods is over, here’s some ideas on how to decorate.

Once Wed:

Style Me Pretty:

Elizabeth Anne Designs:

What do you think of candy buffets? Are you planning to have one? Hopefully this post helps!

{Rachael}