If you’d like to add an extra level of privacy to your wedding gift list, you can now ask your guests to enter a password on your introductory page before they can view your full registry.

One of the great things about Buy Our Honeymoon is that you can set up payment for your gifts in whatever way suits you best. We’ve integrated PayPal into the site so that your guests can quickly and easily pay you directly using their credit or debit card — but you don’t have to use this option if you don’t want to.

If you’ve included payment instructions on your registry that you want to keep private, adding password-protection to your list will help make sure of this.

This feature is just one of our free extra services. If you’d like to set up a guest password for your registry, just contact us and let us know what password you’d like to use.

And — if you’re a customer in the UK, don’t forget that you can customise the text of your registry cards to include your guest password!

One of our aims in our recent launch of customisable themes on Buy Our Honeymoon was to make each design more versatile for different destinations and types of honeymoon.  We’ve just added a couple of new sample lists to the site that we think really illustrate this.

Nat and Joe’s Perfect Manhattan uses our Vegas, Baby! theme for a Christmas honeymoon in New York:

By uploading images of the Statue of Liberty and Times Square, all trace of Las Vegas vanishes from the design, leaving the bright lights of the Big Apple to shine through!

Similarly, our Misty Peaks theme was originally designed with wintery, snow-dusted honeymoons in mind. But customising the images for Christine and Jules’ 4th July Extravaganza transforms it into the backdrop for a two-week summer honeymoon on the shores of Lake Tahoe:

All our themes can now be customised with your own images in this way — so the beach sunshine of Paradise could be adapted for a luxury cruise, the vintage Americana of Road Trip could be adapted into the heat and passion of Brazil, or the Mediterranean vinyards of Scrapbook could become the lush forests of New Zealand.

If you have any queries on how to customise your honeymoon gift list please just get in touch and we’ll do our best to help!

We introduced the Gift Review screen back in 2007 so that guests who reserved more than one item from your list could click through to your PayPal account to pay for all their gifts in one transaction. Your thank-you text and payment instructions would then be shown as part of the confirmation of reserving a gift on your list page as it always had, and would also be shown on the Gift Review screen.

We’ve recently been thinking about this process, and we think it works better to only show your thank-you text and payment instructions on the Gift Review screen. The confirmation message is now much simpler and there’s less opportunity for confusion.

All registries created from 14 May will use this new setting (and all our samples also do, if you’d like to try it out).

We’ve kept things the old way for our previous customers so that your pages aren’t changed unexpectedly — but if you’d like to switch over, please just let us know and we’ll be happy to arrange that for you right away.

The BBC has reported that some tour operators are cancelling flights to Mexico from the UK for the next few weeks as a result of the outbreak of swine flu in the area, and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is advising against non-essential travel to the region for the time being.

Clearly, this will have a major impact on many couples’ honeymoon plans this spring, and although we hope the situation will be resolved very soon, we know that many of you will be in the difficult position of having to make last-minute alternative arrangements.

It’s worth remembering that your guests have bought you gifts because they want you to have a fantastic time.  If you need to change your plans, no-one will mind that their gift of a parasailing experience off the coast of Cancun is spent on something else, as long as you’re safe and happy.

Nonetheless, if you’d like us to help you make adjustments to your honeymoon gift list as a result of the current situation, we’ll be happy to help in any way we can, free of charge.  Do please contact us.

We’ve now rolled out the final phase of our theme updates for Buy Our Honeymoon — and we’ve made some changes to every single design!  Here’s a rundown of all the updates we’ve put in place today:

• All our themes now use special fonts for your registry title and category names. This really gives each theme an extra lift, and themes such as Flowerpower are now even more fun.  If, however, you’d prefer to use the fonts you had previously, just let us know and we can roll this back just for your pages right away.
• California Dreaming is now American Dreaming. The theme is now just as suited to honeymoons among the theme parks and beaches of Florida as it was for California — and the updated theme can be customised with your own images.  If you’re currently using California Dreaming, you can switch to the new theme and upload your own photos by logging-in.

• We’ve retired our New York, New York theme. If you’re currently using New York, New York, though, don’t worry — we won’t have removed it from your pages!
• Our Into the Sunset and Vegas Baby! themes can both now be customised with your own photos. This now means that all our current themes can be customised!
• We’ve adjusted the default images on the Paradise, Road Trip and Misty Peaks themes to use the same styling as the customised versions. We think this makes them look even better, but if you’re using the default images and would like us to revert your pages to their original styling, please let us know and we’ll be happy to arrange that straight away.

As always, if you have any queries or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll do our very best to help.  Don’t forget, you can also keep up with the latest from Buy Our Honeymoon on Twitter, and join in the conversation on Facebook.

Couples from the US and Canada can now select our-wedding-registry.com when you sign up for your free trial.

We offer a range of web addresses, and your guests are always shown the domain option you choose — although you’ll still log in to buy-our-honeymoon.com to make changes to your list, or to view your gift history.

The new our-wedding-registry.com domain is especially suited to mixing honeymoon gifts with traditional household items. We’ll add a new sample registry to the site soon to illustrate this, but in the meantime, take a look at the equivalent sample we put together for our UK customers.

As always, your guests reserve items from your list and then send you the cash value of those gifts, either using the site’s integration with your PayPal account, or in any other way you choose to specify. This allows you to include any items from any shop — whether online or not — offering you complete flexibility in compiling your wedding gift registry.

If you’ve recently signed up for Buy Our Honeymoon and would like to switch your registry over to this, or any of the other domains we offer, please just get in touch and we’ll be happy to arrange that for you.

We’re very pleased to announce that almost all our themes are now customisable with your own photos. We’ve now adapted a further five themes on top of the four designs we’d already worked through: Safari, Zen, Misty Peaks, Flowerpower, and Parchment and Lace.

Some adaptations, such as Parchment and Lace, are very straightforwardly related to the normal version of the theme; others, such as Zen, adjust their layout to accommodate the photos you upload.  As with our other customisable designs, your images will be scaled and cropped automatically, and you can always revert back to the original design if you don’t like how the theme looks with your photo in place.

We’re just ironing out the details on the remaining few themes, so watch this space if the design you’d like to use hasn’t yet been adapted.  And, as always, if you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

We’ve added a couple of extra settings to help out with your gift notification emails that are sent whenever a guest reserves an item from your honeymoon wedding list.

Normally, we’ll send you an email notification message as well as adding details of the gift to your Gift History.  But what if you’d prefer to keep your gifts a surprise until your actual wedding? You can now opt out of receiving notification messages by logging-in and using the new setting in the Your Details tab.  We’ll still update your Gift History, so you can check the details of your gifts at any time if you need to, and to help with your thank-you cards for after your wedding.

Equally, you might like someone else to receive notification of your gifts without them being able to log into your account.  For example, because you’ve got complete flexibility to handle payment for your gifts in whatever way is most convenient, you could ask your guests to send the value of their gifts directly to a personal travel agent or honeymoon coordinator.  It might be useful for that person to be kept informed of the reservations made from your list, so they know what payments to expect.

You can now set this up by adding an email address to your gift notification preferences in the Your Details tab.  This email address can’t be used to log in, and notification messages will be sent to it even if you’ve opted out of receiving them yourselves.

If you have any comments or queries on this new feature, or if you have any other requirements for your honeymoon registry that you’d like to discuss with us, please do just get in touch or leave a message here.  Don’t forget, you can also post on our Facebook wall — or for the very latest news, follow us on Twitter!

♫ Celebrate good times — c’mon it’s a celebration! ♫ — well for us, anyway!

It’s been two years since we launched Buy Our Honeymoon and we never expected it to have the enormous success it’s had.

Since our launch, very nearly 2000 couples have signed up to our honeymoon wedding list service from around the globe.   Tens of thousands of gifts have been reserved through the site and the service itself has changed almost beyond recognition.

For some time now, I’ve joked with Andrew about how embarrassed I am about the original list we wrote back in the summer of 2004!  It now seems so sparse compared to the lists I’ve written for our couples using the Ultimate Service.

Of course, back then the idea of a honeymoon gift list barely existed in the UK — and there wasn’t much to help me from the States either.  So the list was written completely from scratch, with no structure or format to guide me.  Just me making it up as I went along.

So we thought it would be a nice idea to see how far we’ve come in the last two years by re-writing the original list by showing all the features we’ve added along the way (and how much writing practice I’ve had in that time!)

Here’s our original list — that we used for our own wedding:

http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/farley.green.1

And here’s the Special Edition:

http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/ShelleyandAndrew

The most obvious change between them is the pictures.  We really didn’t want to go down the route of just providing a library of stock images, so we needed to figure out a way you could upload your own pictures (from anywhere) that would look great.  I really feel it adds interest to the page and helps guests get a flavour of what they’re giving you.

Many of our themes are now customisable — so for the new version of our list, you’re treated to a picture of us.  It’s actually from our honeymoon, which I guess is bending the rules just a bit!  The customisable designs mean that you can effectively create your own theme for any travels around the world.  We thought Disney’s Cinderella Castle represented our honeymoon best — although I am personally not the biggest fan of the mouse. That honour goes to our daughter!

Another significant change is in the level of description I’ve put for each item.  The more detail you can provide, and the more personal you can make each gift on your registry, the more engaging and successful your list will be. Our original list used the four categories we provide as defaults when you first sign up for your free trial — but we’ve seen couples make incredibly creative use of categories to break up their registry and to tell the story of their honeymoon.

We’ve also added links within item descriptions, a choice of website domains, and the ability to personalise your web address too. Not to mention the ability to request contributions or to specify the number available of an individual item.
Although many of the changes are behind-the-scenes, we feel the comparison really shows how much the site has developed since we went live back in 2007.

So, as we raise our champagne in toast to another successful year, we look to the future and the all the plans we have to make it even better.

Please keep your suggestions coming in, because we really do listen and we really do want to make Buy Our Honeymoon the best honeymoon registry service we possibly can.

Couples from the UK and EU can now select our-wedding-list.co.uk when you sign up for your free trial.

We offer a range of web addresses, and your guests are always shown the domain option you choose — although you’ll still log in to buy-our-honeymoon.com to make changes to your list, or to view your gift history.

The new our-wedding-list.co.uk domain is especially suited to mixing honeymoon gifts with traditional household items:

As always, your guests reserve items from your list and then send you the cash value of those gifts, either using the site’s integration with your PayPal account, or in any other way you choose to specify.  This allows you to include any items from any shop — whether online or not — offering you complete flexibility in compiling your wedding gift list.

To illustrate this, we’ve put together a new sample registry: Beth and Shane’s Wedding Gift List.  This combines gifts for a fantastic honeymoon tour of New Zealand with a few wonderful things for setting up home together.  It also uses the newly-customisable Rose Petals theme.

If you’ve recently signed up for Buy Our Honeymoon and would like to switch your list over to this, or any of the other domains we offer, please just get in touch and we’ll be happy to arrange that for you.