Weddingbee Blog

I’m sorry I didn’t give you guys more advance notice about the show, but I’m very shy about press of any kind.  I know that’s a little ridiculous since I was just on Martha Stewart Radio this morning! 

I’m very much an introvert and still get anxious and nervous whenever I have to speak publicly, but I’ll definitely continue to do more press as the opportunities arise… and hopefully there will be many more opportunities!

So here’s how it all went down… 

I arrived at the Sirius offices in midtown Manhattan bright and early.  A show coordinator came out to greet me, and as we walked to Martha’s recording studio, we passed studios for various Sirius shows including Howard Stern’s (I didn’t get to see him because he has another studio down the hall). 

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Hey everyone!

I’ll be on Martha Stewart Radio sometime this morning after 9.  You can go on the website and listen with a free online trial membership.

Wish me luck!

Mrs. Bee here. 

I recently heard from several readers and bees that they’re more into weddingbee after they’re married than before.  Maybe it’s just PTWS, but I wonder when you totally get weddings out of your system.

So married readers please share, how long have you been married and does your wedding obsession show any signs of waning?

I started Weddingbee because I felt like brides could use honest, personal feedback about the wedding industry…  and I felt like wedding magazines just weren’t doing the trick.  There’s something about blogging that’s just honest and personal.

I just want to clarify: we at Weddingbee would never do anything to jeopordize the editorial integrity of the site. We’ve received many offers for “pay for play” advertising, where advertisers would pay us to write positive reviews of their products.  We turn them all down, because that would totally violate the founding premise of Weddingbee.

The Bees that write for the site are equally scrupulous.  Our Bees are all volunteers, giving their time freely to share their honest and real thoughts with the community.  They also never receive any payment, kickbacks or discounts from vendors!  In the vast majority of cases, most vendors don’t even know that a bride writes for Weddingbee until after the wedding.  The very few exceptions are usually when copyright is involved - so if a bride blogs about a photographer she’s selected, she will usually request permission to post some of the pictures.

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Hi everyone!  Hope you’re having a fantastic Friday!

I did an interview earlier today and they asked for some photos of cool things that have been featured on weddingbee.  I’m pulling together some images for them, and I could really use your help.

Can you guys share some of your favorite projects, pictures, ideas and posts that have been featured on weddingbee to date?  I’d love to get your feedback, and it’s just too hard for me to decide!

One of our advertisers just contacted us because a website posted an ad she has on weddingbee on their site (without permission).  When I clicked over, I thought that the bride character on the front page was awfully familiar looking.  What do you think?

Update: More birds added!

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You guys loved the idea of birds as our next batch of characters, so now we just need to decide which ones! 

Here’s an interesting tidbit I found out while googling bird images - the white doves that are released at weddings are not really doves; they’re actually white homing pigeons who are much stronger flyers and will return home! 

Now on to the task at hand - please help us choose 10 birds for our next batch of characters!

Lovebirds and Chicakadee

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Thanks for your suggestions on our “Real Weddings” icon last week! We loved hellokittyispretty’s idea of the “Just Married” sign, so we had our wonderfully talented artist Irene whip something up. We were worried that the “Just Married” might be hard to see because of the size the icon needed to be, so Irene came up with the idea of adding cans and using a simpler sign. They’re all so pretty, we need your help deciding which one to use!  You can see larger versions here.

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Hi everyone!  I’m in sunny Southern California this weekend visiting my family. 

Earlier this week I was emailing with event coordinator Amy of Amy’s Guide, and she sent me some lovely photos of a wedding she recently coordinated.  So I thought that we should ask wedding planners and photographers to send us pictures of inspirational real weddings, and turn this into a regular feature. 

We already have a “Real Weddings” feature, but we don’t have an icon for it yet.  So we need the help of our wonderfully creative weddingbee readers - please give us some suggestions for our “Real Weddings” icon!

We regularly receive emails from photographers trying to branch out into destination weddings, asking us to post about their free DW photography services.  Couples have to cover airfare and hotel expenses, but all photography services and images are provided free of charge.

I was chatting with Mr. Bee about whether we should post such offers, and he mentioned that it sounded like a great way for a photographer to get a free vacation.  If he were building his portfolio, that’s the way he’d do it.   

While we’d love to help up and coming photographers as well as brides who might benefit from free photography services, we also can’t bear responsiblity for the quality of photos or services rendered. So we’d like to hear your thoughts.  Why do you think so many photographers are offering free destination wedding photography?  And should we post these offers?

Hi everyone!

As you can see below, our beehives have been getting out of control lately.  It’s a lot of work for Miss Lovebug and I, and we also get a ton of emails from users.  So we’re considering launching a board as an experiment - kind of like a larger beehive.  We’ve talked about boards before and got feedback from readers worrying that they’d devolve into unmoderated attack boards.  But we’d work with the community to create and enforce a boards policy, similar to how we’ve been doing it for weddingbee.

Do you think boards are inherently abusive?  Or do you think we can make boards work, if we work together?

Greetings, hive!

Just wanted to let you know that we’re going through the budgets that everyone has so generously submitted, and setting up posts to include some pictures of actual weddings like this one. As one brilliant reader pointed out, it’s great way to show how different brides got the most bang for their bucks. (We’ll still be posting budgets, without pics, as well.)

If you’d like to contribute your budget (photo-illustrated or not), see here.

So stay tuned, and we’ll show you the money!

Hey everyone!  Miss Lovebug here, popping in to let you know that we’ve got a nice fat folder of reader budgets that we’re busily getting organized.  So stay tuned; we’ll be ready to post them starting tomorrow!

 And thanks to everyone who shared their info with us. 

We tried an experiment this past weekend where we temporarily removed the “read more right here” option.  That option forces our frontpage to have a lot more HTML than it needs to have.  As a result, the frontpage takes a lot longer to load - it’s not only loading the HTML you can see, it’s also loading the HTML you can’t see behind the “read more right here” links.

Removing the “read more right here” option resulted in a big increase in first time visitors to the frontpage!  We saw 20% more unique visitors overall, which reflected the fact that the frontpage loaded faster and so more people were able to view it before hitting backspace.  That was pretty amazing.

At the same time, we saw a 100% increase in pageviews.  This was partially due to the extra pageviews from readers clicking “read more” instead of “read more right here”.  From a business perspective, this is great for Weddingbee, after all, we’re probably the only large blog that offers the “read more right here option”.  But from a reader perspective, it’s definitely more convenient to click “read more right here”.  So after all your feedback, we changed it back at midnight last night.

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You guys had so many great suggestions for our next batch of flower characters, it was too difficult for us to narrow them down!  We’re definitely gonna have a peony (there’ll be an all out war for that one), but we need to choose nine more.  So please tell us which 9 out of the 17 flowers below we should choose.

Please keep in mind that we’re looking for the following variables: 1) a variety of color, 2) flowers that don’t look similar to one another, and 3) flowers that you think will be popular as characters. 

Here are the choices:

Peony & Cherry Blossom

(via greenhem & artcatcher)

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