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I’ve often referenced personal wedding websites as a great tool for getting information out to your guests. It centralizes all your information in one universally accessible place, and is a great alternative to expensive, bulky mailed invitation enclosures.
Another invaluable tool for keeping guests current on important updates or wedding-related news–such as a last-minute scheduling change–is an email mailing list service.
Such a service lets your guests sign themselves up to receive important updates by email. It should provide a mechanism for guests to unsubscribe if they like, and an interface where you can easily post your updates and notices.
It makes sense for both your mailing list and wedding website to function together, centralizing all the information as well as the mailing list tools. You can request guests to sign up for your mailing list, with a link to the sign-up form, on your website’s home page.
WedShare’s pre-designed News and Updates page makes it easy to create and maintain your own mailing list service. You easily post important updates to this page with the same full-featured interface you use to create page content, and each entry will be automatically sent to your registered mailing list. Plus, you can designate any notice as a home page alert; such alerts will pop up on your website home page to get the attention of guests who may not have added themselves to your list yet.
Easy setup options for your own mailing list service on the WedShare control panel's News and Updates page. Also available is a link to view and manage all recipients in your current list
Any individual mailing list broadcast can also be added as an alert to your wedding website's home page. You can also specify the alert to be removed after a certain number of days.
Guests can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to your mailing list
Posts you designate as an alert are displayed to all visitors to your wedding website
A major part of your wedding planning will be communication, so don’t neglect this very convenient and helpful tool!
I’ve noticed a lot of couples jumping head-first into the online wedding planning pool without first taking necessary steps to safeguard their privacy–specifically, their personal email address.
Do not, I repeat: do not, use your personal email address for any of the endless online registrations you will be asked to fill out on wedding planning sites. The Knot, Weddingchannel, et. al will promptly begin sending you a barrage of unsolicited emails. Some of these are useful…discounts and special offers, for example…but you really don’t want this clutter in your personal inbox. And once the tidal wave starts, it’s next to impossible to stop.
The solution? Create a wedding-specific email address before you even begin, and use this address to fill out as many online forms, contests, registrations, vendor requests, etc. as you like. When the big day is over, you can close the email address and be done with it. It still surprises me how many couples don’t bother to take this simple step.
You can use a public Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! address for this purpose if you like. Or, use WedShare’s email service to create your own email addresses at your wedding website! You’ll automatically be set up with your own webmail browser, and you can connect it to an offline reader like Outlook if you prefer.
Creating your own email address is easy: just access the Email Manager from your WedShare control panel, and enter in the address as you’d like it to read. It will automatically be set up at your website. So if your website is CristieAndSteve.com, you could create an email address like cristie@CristieAndSteve.com, for example.
Create your own wedding-specific email addresses at your website easily with WedShare's Email Manager
Your personal webmail
That’s it! Your email address is now ready to go. To access and customize your email’s online web interface, log in with the temporary password you’re given. All WedShare members have their own personal online web interface, accessible from anywhere you have web access. Just browse to your wedding website appended by ‘/mail’, like: cristieandsteve.com/mail.
You can send and read emails, create and manage folders and filters, create a contact list, plus lots of other great stuff right on your own personal webmail interface. Customize the look and feel, fonts, colors, and behavior of your webmail, too.
Manage emails at your own personal webmail browser
Another mistake I often see couples make is posting their email address(es) on their website or other online correspondence. Because the web is a public medium (unless you password-protect your website or require authentication, another topic), then your posted email can possibly fall into the hands of a spammer or some other online vermin.
But how can you accept emails if your guests and vendors can’t find your email address on your website? Use an online form, like WedShare’s Contact Us page. This will hide your email address from website viewers, while still providing them a means to send you emails. You can then choose who to respond to, who to ignore, and who to block outright.
Set your names and contact email addresses where "Contact Us" correspondence will go
The Contact Us form on your website allows visitors to pick a contact for their message, while protecting your email addresses. Never post your personal email address in the clear!
Remember that you can never be too careful when it comes to your privacy. That’s it for today; have a great weekend everyone!
Monetary gift registries, also called cash registries, are a growing trend as a wedding gift alternative. They’re convenient for both you and your guests, combining the ease of a cash contribution with the thoughtfulness of a selected gift. The basic idea is an online list of items (i.e. contribution towards a home downpayment, school tuitition, and so forth) that your guests can choose from, and “buy” for you. Their cash gift is typically handled online via a credit card payment, and the proceeds are credited towards the specific item or items they select. You simply cash out the lump sum.
A honeymoon registry is just a monetary gift registry specific to your honeymoon. Thus, items might include contribution towards airfare, a hiking excursion, spa treatment, champagne brunch, or so forth. It lets guests choose specific components of your honeymoon they’d like to sponsor, and it gives you cash to help foot the bill. And when writing your thank-you cards, you can let them know how much you enjoyed their sponsored brunch or hike rather than just thanking them for the green.
There are a number of honeymoon registry services you can find on the web, but they do charge a fee, normally calculated as a percentage of your overall gift amount. A 5% - 8% fee is pretty common. Another option is to create your registry yourself, with features already available on your WedShare wedding website. Your website’s Gift Registry page is integrated with the online credit card merchant PayPal, and having everything available right on your wedding website makes it easier for your guests to find.
Want to set up yours fast and easy? Here are the steps…
Get a Free PayPal Account
PayPal is a popular, trusted service that will allow your guests to use any major credit card to purchase your item(s) in a safe online environment. You have access to the funds right away, and PayPal’s account interface allows you to transfer the gift directly to your bank account.
To work for your honeymoon registry, your PayPal account needs to be a Premier Accountor a Business Account. Both will work, and both are free to create. You select the account type when you set up the account for the first time. Go to PayPal.com to create your account, if you have not already. You can choose “Premier” when selecting the account type, as shown below.
Create a free PayPal account for your registry
Fill out the account creation form, and specify an email address for the new account. You’ll use this email address to identify your PayPal account when linking it to your honeymoon registry. Let’s move onto that next.
Create a WedShare Monetary Gift List
Log into your website’s control panel and edit your Online Gift Registry page by clicking its edit icon. Scroll down to the Monetary Gift Lists section and enter in a name for your registry to create it:
Create a monetary gift list on your website's Online Gift Registry page
Next, edit your new registry’s preferences so you can link it with your PayPal account. Click the Preferences tab, locate the “Allow PayPal” checkbox, and check it. In the field for “Your PayPal Email Address”, enter in the email address you used to create your PayPal account:
Add your PayPal email address in the preferences of your new honeymoon registry
Click the “Save” button to save your changes. You’re almost finished…now it’s just a matter of adding the items.
Create Your Registry Items
In order for your guests to be able to sponsor your honeymoon, you’ll need to create items they can purchase. These can be anything you like: a spa treatment, candlelight dinner for two, you name it. Perhaps you’d like to split a honeymoon item so more than one guest can contribute to it–or provide an open amount contribution option. It’s your honeymoon registry, and your call.
To add an item, click the Items tab and enter in details for a new honeymoon item. When deciding what to add, you can click the “Examples” link to see some example items if you like.
Create items for your registry
You can always edit an item by selecting its Edit link from your item list. Click “Add Image” to upload any image as a graphical icon. To move an item up or down in your list, use the green arrows on the left. You can also place your items in categories if you like, such as “Travel”, “Exploration”, “Dining”, “Entertainment”, and so forth.
Edit registry items to add icon photos and other properties
Repeat for all the items you’d like to set up. Now, when guests browse to your wedding website, they’ll be able to view and use your new honeymoon registry! Gifts will go to your PayPal account for withdrawal (see below). Here’s our sample registry, which you can see live at the WedShare online demo:
Our honeymoon registry, published and ready for use on our wedding website
Managing Purchases
To see who has purchased your items at any time, click the Purchase History tab. You can also log into your PayPal account to view your balance, withdraw money to your bank, and view your purchase history there as well.
Using PayPal, you can check your balance and withdraw at any time
Now you have a fully functional honeymoon registry, right on your wedding website, live and accepting gifts from your guests!
WedShare’s Photo Lab allows you to do just about anything to your wedding website photos, from styling them, to rotating and sizing them, to cropping and adding captions, to managing comments and sharing. Previously, though, if you were in the middle of editing a page and wanted to alter the photo you were inserting, you had to open the Photo Lab to make the changes.
With WedShare’s improved photo selection interface, you can make all your wedding website photo and content changes in one place! Clicking on the photo right on any edit page will shrink the photo down to thumbnail size and open up a selection menu.
Your photos are displayed on the edit screen as they will appear on your website's page
Clicking any photo selection dynamically opens the selection interface:
The selection interface includes an album selector, photo list, details link, and upload link
From here, you can select your photo as before, but notice the links beneath the selection list: “View Details” and “Upload New Photo”. Those are new. Clicking on them will open up dynamically expandable menus to further adjust your imagery.
Edit photo details right at the selection interface
You can show and hide the details menu on the fly while editing your content; this allows you to make changes when you need to, but keep the options hidden when you don’t, to avoid clutter while editing your wedding website pages.
You can also select entire albums instead of single photos to display, and edit the slideshow preferences right here as well.
Selecting an album to display enables you to adjust slideshow preferences
The best part of the photo interface is the control it gives you over your imagery, while at the same time being very quick, straightforward, and easy to use. The menus are really self-explanatory. After all, with all this wedding planning, you don’t have a moment to spare.
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