All posts from "November 2010"

Nov

11

Nice words from Amy

Amy from Etch & Bumble sent us this message this morning, and I thought I should share:

“Marrily is an essential tool for all brides and wedding planners. It is simple to use, easy to navigate, and very reasonably priced. The interface is simple and streamlined; very easy to follow. Alex’s professionalism and expertise is exactly what I was looking for in a developer. He is not only open to new ideas, but is also passionate about making a product that works for the wedding industry. I am ecstatic to work with Marrily on my developing wedding business. I plan on using this program from the very beginning and I can’t wait to see how Alex will continue to improve this product!” – Emy Casner

Amy is a professional wedding planner in Kansas and she can be reached at amy(at)etchandbumble.com.  And don’t forget to check out her site, EtchAndBumble.com as well.

Categories: Testinomials

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Nov

11

Strategic Partnership with DallasWeddingPlanner.com

We’d like to announce the strategic partnership between Marrily and DallasWeddingPlanner.com, the leading Dallas wedding resources website, which will help spread out the words about Marrily to the Dallas metropolitan area.

DallasWeddingPlanner.com provides many useful resources for any couple looking to get ideas and inspiration for the big day.   The blog is also full of tips on how to plan weddings, from an outdoor wedding at the Dallas Arboretum, to a traditional wedding ceremony at SMU’s Perkins Chapel, to creating the perfect backyard wedding at your home.  Couples can also find best Dallas wedding vendors including photographers, reception sites, caterers, wedding cakes, and all other wedding vendors.  The site is packed with useful wedding resources for anyone, from the DIY couples to the wedding professionals.

DallasWeddingPlanner Homepage

Karol Welsh, the president of Dallas Wedding Planner, is one of the most influential individuals in the wedding industry in Dallas, and we are thrilled to work with her and her company to promote a better wedding planning experience with Marrily.  And in her own words,

“Thank you for the opportunity last night to see your new software program, Marrily. I have worked with other software programs over the last ten years as a wedding planner and none of them measure up to Marrily. The ease of navigation is superb as well as the clean easy to read features are excellent not only for that bride doing her own planning but especially for a wedding professional managing dozens of weddings at the same time. Marrily is truly comprehensive in the features offered, realistic to true planning needs and easy to follow.  It is obvious Alex Le has done a tremendous amount of research of what is on the market similar to this product and will be raising the bar with Marrily. Dallas Wedding Planner is thrilled to partner with Marrily to bring the “happiness” in wedding planning.”  - Karol Welsh

Follow DallasWeddingPlanner’s at @BigDWedding to receive more Dallas wedding tips or visit their Facebook page for more info.


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Nov

6

Guests List and Seating Arrangement Improvements

We got some really good suggestions and comments after our focus group this week (hosted by Karol, our great friend at DallasWeddingPlanner).  So for this week I’ve been busy implementing those changes and fixing bugs.  Here’s the summary for the latest changes that just went live:

  • Guests name display format is now changeable, instead of default to “First Last” (e.g. Alex Le), you can switch to the alternative ”Last, First” format (e.g. Le, Alex).  To change the display format, just go to your Account Settings page, check the box, hit save, and you’re done.

    Your Contacts/Guests list, and Seating Arrangement will automatically display the names in the correct format.  Neat!
  • The Seating Arrangement has a new tweak: you can now display the guests’ food choices.  If you have “food selection” enabled for your event, the Seating Arrangement  page will show a checkbox to let you toggle on or off  the food choice of your guests.  You can just glance at the seating chart and know exactly which guest still needs to select their entrée.

    You can also toggle displaying the food choices in the Printable mode of the Seating Arrangement as well.

I hope that these new small tweaks will help you track your guests and prepare the seating plan easier.  If you have any suggestion, just drop me a message.

Happy planning!

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Nov

5

Thinking about planning your wedding online?

Congratulations, you just got engaged.  You are about to join in the “soon-to-be-married” club.  Truth is, you feel overwhelmed.  It’s emotional, it’s something magical just just happened, and you have no words to express it, let alone think about what to do next.  But when the dust settles, you have some time, typically the next 6 – 9 months, to prepare for the biggest day of your life.  You start looking around for tips, resources, inspirations, and suddenly you feel the need to start tracking all these little details.  You can start with Excel or Google Docs, but you want something a bit nicer.  A quick search on Google for “Online wedding planning” reveals about 7M results.  Quite overwhelming.  So where should you start?

You will find that there are different free services that provide wedding planning tools, and they mostly provide the same features in one way or another:  checklists, budgets tracker, guests management, and sometimes seating arrangement.  Each website comes with its own color, shape, and size, and you will probably have to evaluate them to find out which one you’d like to work with and comfortable with keeping your valuable data for the next 6 months.  However, there’s a catch to these free services, you are bombarded with other miscellaneous stuff including an overdose of advertisements.  263 is the number of links on a typical page of TheKnot.com.  On OurWeddingDay.com, the homepage has a whopping 343 links.  To put things in perspective, Marrily has 1/10 of TheKnot’s number of links, not to mention we’re completely ad-free.  The number of links is not an accurate indicator for how good the tool is, but in a way it reflects the nature of the website: is it a tool to help you plan your wedding, or is it also aimed at overwhelming you with a lot of resources you may not need (while also trying to sell you something)?

When I set out to build Marrily, I wanted to offer a different experience, and I want to treat my users better.  I asked friends and even paid Facebook to run questionnaires to get to know other people’s experience with online wedding tools, and the responses were almost the same:  people want a simple, just-work tool with less commercial fillers.  Marrily is designed on this philosophy, and it offers a different experience than the free-but-full-of-ads alternatives.  The right way to do it is to design a great premium tool, since with free tools, there is no other way to keep the the service running in the long run other than bombarding users with ads.

I personally invite you to give Marrily a shot.  We offer a 14-day trial period, and we also offer unique features that no other sites are offering, such as the seating arrangement and sharing access with multiple users.  Not to mention the live chat which you can ping us directly should you need some help getting started.  And if you want more time to evaluate, just drop me an email at alexle[at]marrily.com and I’d be more than happy to extend the trial for you.

Plan your wedding happily with Marrily, and don’t forget to smile, you are about to experience the best day of your life.  We are here to help you plan your wedding better.

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Nov

2

On living life

I recently ran into an article titled “Life and How to Survive It” written by a litigation lawyer in Singapore.  The article offers some refreshing ideas on how to live a fuller life of love and meaning.

http://mrwangsaysso.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-and-how-to-survive-it.html

Since marriage is a moment when lives change, no longer one can live without another stranger, magical things happen.  However, having a right attitude and expectation of the new life together can help both get a more wonderful experience.  I love these lines from the article:

You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

Live your best life together, and don’t forget to enjoy everyday of it.

Categories: Announcements

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