Weddingbee Blog

Thank you to all our members and readers for taking the recent Weddingbee survey! Because we’d never ask you to complete a lengthy survey and not follow up, we wanted to take the time to comb through the responses, and collectively respond to the results.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 94% of you said you were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the site.
• 84% of you gave 4 or 5 stars to the site for having useful information.
• 76% gave 4 or 5 stars for “the quality of community interaction”.

Thanks for the vote of confidence in the site, our hardworking bloggers and our awesome community! We’ll keep working to get those numbers even higher in the coming year.

We’re humbled by the overwhelmingly positive numbers—we’ve worked hard to put out features that we think will benefit everyone! We’re grateful for your responses, as they’re shaping our goals for the coming year. While it’s a bit of a moot point to focus on the positive, we wanted to open up to the hive about where members felt we needed improvement, and brainstorm ways that we can make those improvements happen in the near future!

Boards Organization: Many of you requested better organization of the boards.

For example, married members wanted a way to only read newlywed content. If you’ve visited the boards in the past couple weeks, you may have noticed a reorganization! Now, in addition to viewing the boards individually, you can view them as “all”, “wedding related”, or “nwr” (non-wedding related)!

Bios: Bios is something that I personally pushed long and hard for. We rolled out bios last year and haven’t made vast changes to it since, except for upgrading the homepage from text to visual. We’re currently working on an upgrade: integrating your Weddingbee bio with your profile page… creating a “master profile” of sorts, encompassing your bio, plus all of your commenting activity throughout the site (not just boards, but bios, classifieds, DIY, and gallery, too!). So, if a user clicks on your profile and you’ve created a bio, they’ll be able to see your bio right there! We’ve had a few other ideas for bios, but would love your input: how would you like to see the bios improved?

DIY: There were a lot of calls for more DIY on the site! We’ve proposed a few ways to step up the DIY presence on the site, and we’ll kick these off in the next few weeks!

• DIY Fridays: We’ll post the latest and greatest DIY projects that are uploaded to the DIY section of the site on Fridays! That way, if you haven’t had a chance to check out what members have contributed lately, you’ll see it on the blog!
• More calls for DIY contributions: Remember our Guest DIY feature? We’d love for guest bloggers to contribute DIY to the site! If you’ve found that you don’t have the time to be a full time blogger, but would love to see your awesome wedding projects get more exposure, please submit your Guest DIY posts to guest (at) weddingbee (dot) com! We’d love to share your project with the hive! And, in our DIY Friday posts, I’ll be sure to make regular calls for DIY projects to be shared.

So, we turn to you, hive! Upload your latest and greatest posts to the DIY section, or shoot us an email if you feel like your project is worthy of being shared with the world, and you may see it featured on the blog!

More Real Weddings and Real Budgets: We haven’t made public calls for these recently… admittedly they take a LOT of time to put together! Between selecting pictures, resizing them, and organizing submissions into blog form, many of these posts can take upwards of 2 hours from start to finish! But, you love them, so we’re working on ways to make the submission process easier for both you and for us to publish. Soon you’ll see that the submission pages for both Real Weddings and Real Budgets will be formatted with form boxes. Rather than having to freestyle submit via email, you’ll soon be able to add your answers so that they will come to us in a more complete, blog-like form… thus making both submissions AND publishing easier! Hooray!

While we’re revamping the submission form, we’re still accepting submissions in the current format! If you’d like to see your wedding featured on Weddingbee, check out our past Real Weddings and Real Budget features (We’re looking for all budgets, from $100 to $1,000,000!), and please don’t hesitate to submit your real wedding/real budget to us by following the directions here at Real Weddings and Real Budgets.

Search: Many of you felt that it’s not easy to find archived content on the site, and that the search functions could use a face lift. Currently our search is powered by Google, and we have plans to begin working on our own search engine that will better help you find what you need! This will be a huge project to tackle for us, but well worth it!

Classifieds: We’re impressed by the level of usage Classifieds has seen, and because it’s such a big part of the site, we’re taking your comments to heart. Some surveyed noted that they’d appreciate a better way to search for items—for example, by size—and we hope to integrate upgraded classifieds searches into our upcoming search overhaul.

Confusion when first stumbling upon the site: Several survey responders noted that they were perplexed as to what Weddingbee was and how it worked. Users said they’d like to see an explanation of Weddingbee displayed in a more clear place on the front page. We’re considering a couple options to remedy this – perhaps a link right next to the “Ideas” and “Support”, and calling it “First Time Users”, where you’ll be able to find information frequently asked by first time visitors to the site. We’d love your help on this! What did you find most confusing about Weddingbee when you first found the site? Mr. Bee has started a thread on the boards that you can contribute to!

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We’re excited for the upcoming year, and will continue to work hard to deliver site improvements and new features that we think you’ll love! And thank you again to all who took the survey!