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The Bride’s Book

We were delighted to learn that The Bride’s Book, an award-winning wedding magazine based in the Carolinas and serving the southwestern United States, had chosen to feature us in their new Spring 2010 issue.

Here’s what they wrote:

Consider a Honeymoon Registry

For the many couples who have already established a home together, a honeymoon registry is a fantastic way for guests to give you a meaningful wedding gift without doubling up on all the traditional housewares you already have.

You can break down your honeymoon into parts for your guests to reserve as gifts – activities and excursions, romantic meals, upgrades, or contributions to your airfare or accommodations – add anything you like! Visit www.buy-our-honeymoon.com for more information.

We’re really grateful to Courtney and the team at The Bride’s Book for this — the whole issue looks fabulous! You can find out more about The Bride’s Book on their blog, or on Twitter.

Refinements to big-ticket items

One of the great things about your Buy Our Honeymoon gift registry is the flexibility you have in how to divide up and present the items on your list. As well as single items, which become unavailable as soon as one of your guests has reserved them, you can have items that can be reserved an unlimited number of times, open contributions, and big-ticket items divided into a specific number of gifts.

So let’s say you’re taking a flight that costs £600 and you’d like to ask for contributions towards this.  You might decide to divide this item into 12 gifts of £50 each, so that your guests could then sponsor 500 miles (or more) of your journey.

Editing "The Road to Cairo"

We’re very happy to answer queries from your guests by email or phone, and we take careful note of the kinds of questions that come up to see if there are ways we can improve and refine a guest’s experience of using the site. This, together with some great feedback by one of our customers, prompted us to make a couple of small changes to how the way these kinds of gifts are presented on your registry pages.

Previously, the item would note how many gifts were still available — so, if 1000 miles had already been bought, it would say “10 available”.  Clicking to reserve that item would then also show a note that 10 gifts remained out of 12 originally available.

We’ve now refined this to make it more immediately clear when some gifts have already been reserved, and to try to explain a little better what a gift that’s divided in this way really means.

The Road to Cairo

At first, the item now states “12 of 12 gifts available”. Then, as soon as a gift of the item is reserved, this changes to “11 of 12 gifts remaining”.  And the note on the reservation form now states that “this item has been divided into 12 gifts of £50.00 from a total cost of £600.00.”

We hope that these two little tweaks will help to make it clearer to guests exactly what’s going on with these kinds of gifts, while still integrating them seamlessly into the rest of your list.

Of course, we’ll keep a close eye on guests’ reactions to the new format — and if you have any queries or comments yourselves, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

The Wedding Ideas Awards 2010

As our fans on Facebook will already know, we were overjoyed to learn that Buy Our Honeymoon was one of only three finalists for Best Gift List in the Wedding Ideas Awards 2010.

The Wedding Ideas Awards are determined solely from the votes of real couples across the UK, so we simply can’t thank all our wonderful customers enough for your amazing support in getting us nominated alongside John Lewis and Debenhams — household names here in the UK, and the two largest department store chains in the country.

We’re not normally in competition with the high street — if you’re setting up home together for the first time as a married couple, the traditional department store registry of kitchenware and linens is a natural and appropriate choice. Instead, we believe we offer a romantic, meaningful alternative for couples who already have all the household items they may need, and who would actively prefer a different kind of wedding gift.

So it was truly incredible to find ourselves pitted against two 800lb gorillas of the industry. That’s 1600lbs of gorilla!

As the nation’s most popular gift list service, it was only right that the award itself went to John Lewis, leaving us and Debenhams both Highly Commended. It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s true: it really was an honour to be nominated.

We’re still a very new business, and to be recognised like this at such a prestigious event in the wedding calendar is simply awesome. Just like Wedding Ideas Magazine itself, we’re small, independent and completely dedicated to providing the best service we possibly can.

To have been voted ahead of so many other popular and well-known companies — both traditional and alternative — is phenomenal. We’re very, very grateful to our fabulous customers and supporters for all your votes and kind words — and we’ll do everything we can to make sure we deserve your support next year, too.

10 more fantastic theme customisations

Back in July, we showcased some of the most exciting ways you’d all customised your wedding list pages using our design themes.  We’re so proud to have such creative and talented customers, we thought it might be fun to take a look at another ten of the very best.

Our new Vintage theme has been incredibly popular already, and seems to lend itself very well to being adapted with your own photos, as Tahnee and Matt’s honeymoon registry shows:

We love the gorgeous “just married” car, and having the photo in black-and-white works brilliantly with the subdued colour scheme of the design.

Speaking of cars, Iain and Jo have adapted Parchment and Lace with a stunning vintage car for their honeymoon in Cuba:

The sepia treatment of the image complements the tones of the theme, and very successfully turns a design intended for European antiquity into a design that works perfectly for the colonial elegance of Havana.

Hannah and Nigel took a very different approach for their own Cuban honeymoon adventure!

Same destination, same classic car, completely different result. Here, the vivid colours of the illustration combine with our Road Trip theme to evoke the latin passion and spice of the region!

Many couples use our customisable themes to include a photo of themselves in their design, which is a great idea and really helps to make your wedding list all your own.  We thought Michelle and Ewan’s photo was just outstanding!

The energy of the photo works so well with the quirkiness of the Flowerpower design, and adds real personality to their wedding registry.

Similarly, in one of the very first customisations made of our new Vintage theme, Chris and Sarah chose the perfect photo to upload!

This theme introduces a slight vignette effect to the photos you upload, which adds just a little extra romance to what’s already a wonderfully romantic shot of the happy couple.

Now, if you were planning a honeymoon to the Canadian rockies, you’d use our Misty Peaks theme, right? Well, Lucy and Graham had the fantastic idea of customising our Paradise theme with this fabulous image, exchanging palm trees and golden sands for crisp mountaintops and glacial lakes.

We’ve always thought that uploading fresh images into a theme could allow a design originally built for one kind of honeymoon to work just as well for another — but we didn’t expect that our tropical beach design could be so successfully transformed!

Of course, that’s not to say that Misty Peaks can’t be adapted beautifully.

Sarah and Ed have chosen a breathtaking photo to customise their wedding list for a honeymoon to Rejkavik, Iceland, with the sumptous green of the valley floor contrasting wonderfully with the dusky mauves of the theme background.

In the last of our picks using the Vintage theme, Stephanie and Evan have chosen to highlight the romantic White Gate Inn, where they’ll be staying for their honeymoon in North Carolina.

Their design emphasises the history and charm of Asheville, and is a great way of bringing to life an offbeat honeymoon destination. The more your guests can engage with your honeymoon plans, the more they’ll enjoy using your registry.

Our Scrapbook theme has always been one of our most popular and versatile designs, and we were really pleased to see it being used so well for a honeymoon in Maui!

Nige and Nic have chosen a lovely, slightly retro, watercolour image that looks like it’s always belonged with the leafy background of this theme, and is another great example of taking a design we put together with one kind of honeymoon in mind, and adapting it perfectly for a completely different destination.

Finally, Andrew and Sarah chose Parchment and Lace for their multi-centre trip to New York and Barcelona, and found an image that worked brilliantly for both, pulling together the deep history of Broadway, and the Gothic charm of Catalonia.

Even the subtlest of changes can really personalise and enliven the design you choose for your honeymoon gift list.

That’s ten of the best designs we’ve seen, out of the hundreds you’ve created in these past few months alone.  It’s been hard to pick only ten — we love seeing the creativity and personality that shines through from every wishlist on the site!

If you have any queries about customising our themes, or using any of the other great features of our honeymoon gift list service, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.  We’ll be very happy to help in any way we can.

New theme – Vintage

We’ve now released a brand-new design theme for Buy Our HoneymoonVintage. Evoking the sophisticated 1940s or the glamorous 1950s, it features a beautiful floral patterned background, a muted colour palette, and stylish inset photography.

It’s the first theme we’ve designed from scratch since we upgraded all our themes earlier this year to enable you to upload your own photos into the design and to use special fonts for your registry title and category names. Naturally, Vintage can also be fully customised, and (if you’ll forgive me) features the best uppercase-H of any font I’ve ever seen!

Vintage is suitable for any honeymoon destination (though we think it’ll work particularly well for adventures in Latin America or romance in Western Europe) and it’s available right now for all our customers.  Just log in and click the purple Theme tab, or click here to start your free trial.

Registry cards to coordinate with the new design will be available from Monday for our customers in the UK and EU.

We’ll also have a new sample list using Vintage available as soon as possible — but for now, here’s James and Mel’s Honeymoon Paradiso in the new theme.

We’re always on the lookout for new ideas for design themes we could offer, so if you feel there’s a gap in our repertoire, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

And, to stay right up-to-date with all the latest developments, why not become a fan on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

So You’re EnGAYged

We’re completely thrilled to have been approved as a pro-gay wedding vendor on So You’re EnGAYged, an excellent wedding resource for same-sex and allied couples.

So You're EnGAYged

So You’re EnGAYged lists vendors based on their answers to a questionnaire regarding their relationship with the LGBT community and their support of LGBT rights. Although we don’t specifically ask couples signing up to use the site whether they’re same-sex, around 1.5% of couples signing up provide a title (Mr/Ms etc) for both partners that suggests a same-sex marriage. We believe our site uses gender-neutral vocabulary throughout and, just as a small courtesy, if you indicate through your choice of titles that you’re a same-sex couple, we remove our bride-and-groom cartoon from the masthead of your management screens and of course your registry itself.

As well as a vendor directory, soyoureengayged.com is also an active blog featuring gay weddings and engagements, together with news, ideas, polls and competitions.  You can also follow @soyoureengayed on Twitter. We’re very grateful to have been listed, and look forward to the continued success and growth of the site!

If you have any queries about our honeymoon registry service, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

5 fab services found on Twitter

twitterWe’ve been enjoying the Twitter machine for a few months now — it’s great to be able to connect with customers and to keep everyone up-to-date with announcements and developments to the site.  If you don’t already, you should follow us on Twitter here.

It’s also fascinating to chat with other wedding vendors, and to discover new companies offering wedding and travel services that we might not have heard of otherwise.  So, since it’s a Follow Friday, we thought we should do our bit to help raise the profile of some of the most unusual of these.

BrideTide — @bridetide, www.bridetide.com

Prolific and consistentlty interesting on Twitter itself, BrideTide is a dedicated wedding news portal in the mould of Digg or Reddit, collecting together the best wedding blog posts, tips, trends and advice from around the web. Free to join, BrideTide users can vote and comment on all stories and contribute their own links and discussion topics.

Wedcycle — @wedcycle, www.wedcycle.com

A brand new site currently offering free membership, Wedcycle lets you pass on items from your wedding such as tealights, table centrepieces, flowerpots and so on.  Rather than letting these gather dust in the attic, you could list them on Wedcycle for other couples to collect and use in their own weddings!

ooh.com — @oohdotcom, www.ooh.com

A great way to research and book activities for your honeymoon, ooh.com lists fresh events, tours, and experiences. Activities are added to the site by independent individuals and companies, who offer a huge variety of things you’d normally never hear about, in locations all over the world.

Wish Lanterns — @wishlantern, www.weddingwishlanterns.co.uk

Beautiful and safe, wedding sky lanterns are a more peaceful alternative to fireworks, traditionally used in Asia and available from Wish Lantern in the UK and USA. The lanterns symbolise the release of your worries and problems, and people have the option of writing a wish on a little tag and attaching it to the lantern for the bride and groom to send up into the skies.

Creative Custom Card Boxes — @cardboxdiva, www.creativecustomcardboxes.com

With many of our customers opting to receive the value of their honeymoon gifts in a card on the day of their wedding, how could we resist Marni Gold’s handmade, bespoke card boxes? Each box is unique, completely personalized to match your wedding, and a great way to keep your wedding cards safe long after your big day.  Shipping is free within the USA, and available worldwide.

And of course, that’s just scratching the surface, without even mentioning great wedding blogs like @rocknrollbride, handmade stationery artists such as @weddingpara, or brilliant wedding photographers like @bigbouquet.

Do you have any recommendations of other fab wedding and travel services to follow? Let us know in the comments, or of course, by sending us a message @buyourhoneymoon.

Download your Gift History to Excel

excelWe’ve recently had a couple of requests to be able to download your Gift History to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and we agree that this would be a useful addition to the site to help you manage your thank-you cards and messages.

So now, once you’ve received any gifts on your honeymoon wedding list, if you log in and click through to the Gift History tab, there’s a link at the foot of the page to do precisely this.

If you have a copy of Excel, or any other spreadsheet application that can open Excel documents, you can download an updated version of this file as often as you like.

This allows you to sort and filter your gifts by any criteria you choose — for example, you could view only the gifts where you haven’t yet received payment, sorted by your guests’ email addresses.

It’s a small new feature, but one of many we have lined up as we approach the New Year.  We hope you find it useful!

Gift notifications for guests

Here at Buy Our Honeymoon, we’re endlessly searching for ways to make sure the experience of reserving gifts from your wedding list is as smooth and enjoyable for your guests as possible. Every week, thousands of gifts are made through the site without a hitch, but we’re still always on the lookout for anything that might be confusing or difficult, and then trying to make it easier.

It’s great how people become really involved in choosing their gifts from a couple’s honeymoon registry. Instead of a bland decision between different assortments of silverware, guests are able to give very personal, meaningful presents. So, occasionally, a guest will reserve a gift through the site, and then right away notice something else they’d much prefer to give instead!

The notification emails sent to you when you receive a gift through the site have always been delayed by an hour, so that guests can contact us if they’ve reserved a gift in error or wish to change their mind. But we’ve now improved this by offering a simple way to cancel a gift as soon as it’s made, directly through the site.

Previously, the site would send a confirmation email to a guest immediately when a gift was reserved, but we’re now introducing an hour’s delay to this as well.  This means that guests won’t get a misleading email confirmation for a gift they’ve cancelled.

It also means that we can note in the email whether or not we’ve received confirmation of a successful payment for the gift. Often, guests click through to pay the value of their gift straight into your PayPal account as soon as they reserve their gift — but because we’d already sent the email, we couldn’t acknowledge this.

We hope that these changes help to further clarify the gift confirmation messages shown to guests.  We also have additional improvements to the Gift Review screen in the works for later this year — watch this space or follow us on Twitter for all the latest developments!

Lots of small updates

We’ve got some great things cooking for the rest of the year, but we’re always making small improvements and little changes to Buy Our Honeymoon in response to customer feedback and enquiries from guests.

  • We’ve added Argentine pesos, Colombian pesos, Bahraini dinars and Icelandic króna to the set of display currencies you can use for your honeymoon registry.  Because PayPal don’t keep account balances in any of these currencies, you can’t use them to collect your actual gifts — but you can list your registry items in any of the 24 currencies we support, and we’ll automatically convert your gifts to your PayPal currency using exchange rates refreshed every day.
  • For customers who choose not to use PayPal to collect the value of your gifts, the button to move through to the screen showing your payment instructions and thank-you text now says How to pay instead of Review your gifts.  We found that, very occasionally, guests found the previous wording confusing.
  • Since late April, any links you add to your wedding list intro texts, payment instructions or item descriptions will now open in a new window.
  • We’ve improved the search on our homepage to better recognise when a guest enters both surnames or the registry URL by mistake.
  • In May, we improved the accuracy of the visitor counts for your registry pages in your Gift History.
  • We’ve improved the way all our design themes handle really long category names, and our Parchment and Lace theme is now more robust in older versions of Internet Explorer.
  • Finally, your honeymoon registry will now respond a little more intelligently when it looks like you’ve made a test reservation for yourself.

For news on all the very latest updates and improvements to Buy Our Honeymoon, join us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter!