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Hiding your registry from Google

As part of our honeymoon wedding list service, we try to make sure that the introductory page of your registry can be found in Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is because many wedding guests expect to be able to get to a couple’s wedding list by entering its web address into their favourite search engine.

When we first launched back in 2007, we took steps to avoid Google or other search engines from linking to any actual registries on our site — but we quickly discovered that for lots of people, Google is the Internet. Our customers in the UK and EU can request a set of customised registry cards featuring the full web address of their wedding list, but we’d often find that guests would enter that URL into Google, which would then report that the page couldn’t be found. So we gave Google access to the introductory page of each registry, while still blocking access to subsequent pages.

This strategy worked out really well. Generally, guests are now able to find their way to the first page of your site even when entering its address into Google, and intro pages typically don’t contain your surnames, wedding date or other information you wouldn’t want to be available publicly.

However, that might of course not be the case for everyone.  We can set up your registry so that visitors can’t view later pages, including your payment instructions, without entering a guest password — but you may prefer that your introductory page is also kept strictly private.

If that’s something you’d like, just let us know, and we’ll block Google and other search engines from including your registry in their search results.

Pages already in Google’s index may take a short time to disappear. However, Google won’t index your registry until your honeymoon gift list is fully activated. If you’re still on your free trial, setting up this block will make sure your pages never appear in search engine results at all.

If you have any queries on this, or regarding our wedding list service in general, please leave a comment below or drop us an email.

Multilingual wedding lists in Italian and German

At the end of September, we launched a new feature to our wedding list service where you can provide your honeymoon registry in more than one language. This is great for couples with international families: not only can you list gifts in multiple currencies, you can also have your registry appear in English and up to two other languages.

We launched with three languages available: French, Spanish and Portuguese.  With profound thanks to our amazing customers who’ve helped us with translations, we now also have Italian and German languages available too.

To enable this on your pages, just let us know which languages you’d like to use, and we’ll be glad to set this up for you. If you’re using PayPal to collect payments, we’ll also make sure your guests have the same language options for their credit card transactions.

This service is completely free, and if you feel your guests would benefit from another language apart from the ones listed above, we’d love to hear from you.

8 more amazing wedding blogs to follow

Earlier in the year, we posted a roundup of 8 brilliant wedding blogs to follow, and it’s high time we brought you the sequel. Here’s a further selection of outstanding blogs and online resources we’ve found in our travels around the web, looking for information and trends to help us bring you the best wedding gift list service we possibly can.

The Honeymoon Project — @thehoneymoonpro, thehoneymoonproject.com

Brought to you by Emma Gibbs, a travel writer for Rough Guides and Travel Intelligence, The Honeymoon Project is a fantastic resource for planning all aspects of your honeymoon — from choosing your destination to honeymoon perks and much more. Where to go, when to book, what to pack, how to get there, and what to eat. This site is comprehensive, regularly updated, and totally essential.

Honeymoons Blog — @honeymoonsblog, www.honeymoonsblog.com

Also focussed exclusively on honeymoon destinations, advice and ideas, Sarah Jenson’s Honeymoons Blog is a treasure-trove of information and guidance. Including recommendations on honeymoon activities and tips on how to prepare for your journey, the blog also aims to help you answer the big question: what kind of honeymoon is right for us?

Budget Savvy Bride — @budgetbride, budgetsavvybride.co.uk

Full of ideas and suggestions on wedding bargains, offers and discounts, Budget Savvy Bride is your guide to getting the most out of every penny you spend on your big day. With an accompanying email newsletter, the blog regularly features deals on bridal fashion, accessories, hen and stag activities and honeymoons. Don’t miss Fiona’s guide to setting your wedding budget, and her recent review of our honeymoon gift list service!

English Wedding — @english_wedding, english-wedding.com

Offering both fabulous real wedding photoshoots and expert insight into the wedding industry from a supplier’s perspective, English Wedding is a celebration of everything that’s great and gorgeous about weddings this side of the pond, and firmly opposed to the old-fashioned practices that hold the industry back.

Updated and nurtured by Claire, whose own wedding calligraphy business informs her perspective as a wedding supplier, English Wedding is the home of the Ethical Wedding Suppier pledge, and recently featured a guest post from us on the variety of wedding list services available in the UK.

The Wedding Chicks — @weddingchicks, www.weddingchicks.com

Showcasing real weddings with beautiful photography, hand-picked vendor recommendations, and everything fab and funky in American weddings, The Wedding Chicks also includes free DIY projects and templates, and their own range of t-shirts and tote bags! Vibrant, comprehensive and inspirational — and kind enough to describe our service as “pretty much the best registry ever” — we’re proud to have been a blog sponsor earlier this year.

OMG I’m Getting Married — @omgimmarried, www.omgimgettingmarried.com

Inspiration, fashion and amazing photoshoots cooked up in our London hometown, OMG stands out among the UK’s top wedding blogs. It’s smart, impeccably designed, and unmissable. What’s more, an interview with OMG’s Alexis was just recently published on the Channel 4 website — what better recommendation could you need?

A Practical Wedding — @practicalwed, www.apracticalwedding.com

With the tagline “weddings, minus the insanity, plus the marriage” and offering a refreshingly grounded approach to wedding planning and life thereafter, A Practical Wedding was suggested to us in a comment in our last roundup.  We’re so glad it was: it’s intelligent, culturally literate, cosmopolitan and brilliantly honest — not just in the quality of the posts themselves, but in the discussions each one provokes. Highlights include articles on money and budgets, second weddings, and making a traditional ceremony your own — but that’s just skimming the surface.

Staggered USA — @iamstaggeredusa, www.iamstaggered.com/usa

Imperial measurements, Pop Idol, Beckham and measles: the British have given much to America. We profiled the UK’s leading online wedding magazine for men last time, and we’re thrilled that they’re now launching in the United States!

Featuring expert advice and personal experiences on proposals, bachelor parties, wedding toasts and honeymoons, all tailored smartly to accommodate a Y-chromosome, Staggered challenges that myth that men aren’t interested in their own weddings. It’s also funny in the way that only a woodland animal in a tuxedo can be.

We’d like to wish Andrew, Brenda and the rest of the team (in sheds or otherwise) the very best of luck with their plans for global conquest.

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We’ve one more brilliant resource to show you. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of wedding directories on the web, showcasing different local wedding suppliers, venues and professionals. Uniquely, though, the Dream Wedding Directory (@DreamWeddingUK) is a superb, curated selection of wedding blogs — featuring advice and news from suppliers and commentators alike. Covering specialist topics from planning, photography and honeymoons (where we’re proud to appear ourselves), this site is a goldmine.

Who have we missed? Do you have any recommendations of other fab wedding blogs? Let us know in the comments, or send us a message on Twitter.

The Ethical Wedding Supplier Pledge

The wonderful English Wedding blog has just launched a new initiative that we’re wholeheartedly behind: an Ethical Wedding Supplier Pledge.

Wedding suppliers who sign up promise to:

  • Never charge more for a wedding than they would for any other event.
  • Care about customer service and make shopping with their company a pleasant experience for brides and grooms.
  • Openly offer help and advice to brides and grooms.
  • Recommend other suppliers when their own order book is full.
  • Never badmouth another wedding supplier.
  • Recycle and minimise waste as a lifestyle choice for their business.
  • Respect other businesses’ copyright and intellectual property.
  • Follow distance selling regulations (including showing full contact details on their web site).
  • Engage in friendly competition and network with fellow wedding suppliers.
  • Share advice with new wedding businesses if they ask for help.

This is all completely in line with how we’ve grown and developed our business since we began back in 2007, so we had no hesitation in adding our name to the list of businesses who are committed to these principles — and we now proudly display the badge on our testimonials and reviews page.

Improving our homepage search

We love to be able to make improvements to our wedding list service in response to customer suggestions. We recently received an email from one of our customers in the US, who had an idea regarding the search facility on our homepage that lets your guests go directly to your registry by entering your surname and the date of your wedding.

She’d found that if, in a hurry, you enter the full name of one of the happy couple (instead of just their surname), the site wouldn’t be able to find the registry you’re looking for. You might then start to doubt the wedding date you’d entered!

We thought this was a really good point — so we’ve now improved our homepage search to respond much more flexibly to the name that’s entered.

As long as the wedding date you enter is correct, the site will now take you directly to your registry whether you enter a surname, both surnames, a full name or even just a first name. In fact, there’s actually now 46 different combinations that we’ve tried to account for!

If there are two or more couples with the same wedding date whose names match what you’ve entered, you’ll be able to choose the registry you’re looking for. If there’s only one matching registry, we’ll take you straight to it.

To try to keep things simple for your guests, we still ask for the surname of either partner — but we’ll do our best to find the couple you mean.

And don’t forget, if your wedding celebration is taking place on a different date from your actual ceremony, just let us know both dates and we’ll make sure the search works properly for both.

Our customers in the UK and Europe can request a set of customised registry cards, so your guests can go straight to your wedding list without needing to visit our homepage or search. And many couples choose to link directly to their registry pages from their own wedding website — but our search nonetheless gets used hundreds of times every day, so we’re really pleased to be able to make it work better!

Display your honeymoon registry in more than one language

TranslationsOur honeymoon registry service is uniquely suited to helping couples with international families. Because your wedding list is available online, any of your guests with an internet connection can view, reserve and pay for items on your registry, wherever they live. You can include anything you can imagine on your wedding gift registry, and we provide ample room for the title and description of each item, together with support for multiple currencies and automatic currency conversion.

We’ve now added a major new feature to help guests use your wedding list if their first language isn’t English.

Our system includes various short instructions, buttons and links to help your guests buy items and navigate your registry, together with notification and reminder emails for gifts that they’ve reserved. All of these can now be provided in multiple languages.

We currently have translations available in:

  • French
  • Spanish
  • Portuguese

You’ll always need to include English as one of the languages shown on your registry, but we can enable up to two additional languages to be displayed alongside this. Just let us know what additional language or languages you need, and we’ll set this up for you, for free. If you’re using PayPal to collect payments, we’ll also make sure your guests have the same language options for their credit card transactions.

Multilingual wedding list

The format of some aspects of your wedding list will change when you have multiple languages shown, but the same design themes, extensive customisation options, formatting tools and payment choices will remain available exactly as before.

Regrettably, we’re not able to provide telephone or email support to guests in any language other than English, but we’ll do our best to help with any messages we do receive. The management screens for you to edit your list when you log in are also still only available in English.

If you have a lot of guests who would benefit from a different language from those shown above, and can help us with some translations, we’d love to hear from you. And of course, please don’t hesitate to contact us or to leave a comment below if you have any queries on our multilingual wedding list service, or any other aspect of our site.

UPDATE: We’ve now added Italian and German translations!

UPDATE 2: We’ve also now added Swedish!

Wedding post boxes and honeymoon albums

We’ve always been big fans of the design work of Zoe Rusga, better known as Bunny Delicious. Her playful, handmade, and meticulously detailed wedding stationery is quite unlike anything else we’ve seen.

In particular, for those of you opting to receive the value of your honeymoon gifts on the day of your wedding, the Bunny Delicious range of wedding card post boxes offer a gorgeous and practical way to collect your wedding cards at your reception, and make for a lasting keepsake in their own right.

Bunny Delicious wedding post boxes

And then we discovered through the excellent Rock My Wedding blog that Bunny Delicious also make handmade photo albums specifically for your honeymoon! What an awesome idea — how could we resist?

Full of brilliant, unique details and completely tailored to your own honeymoon, these albums are an amazing way of keeping your honeymoon memories as special and important as the photos from your wedding day. You could even include your honeymoon gift certificates!

Bunny Delicious honeymoon album (South Africa)

Each handmade album has 20 pages (or 40 if you use both sides of each page) and comes in a matching presentation box.

Bunny Delicious honeymoon album (Las Vegas)

We initally thought Bunny Delicious might be totally unique in producing custom honeymoon albums — but then we found out that our friends at Wedding Paraphernalia can also provide an elegant alternative as part of their range of handmade wedding invitations, favours and accessories.

Honeymoon album from Wedding Paraphernailia

Wedding Paraphernalia have retail premises in Northamptonshire, but accept online orders at weddingparaphernalia.co.uk and can be contacted on 0845 22 63 192. You can also follow @weddingpara on Twitter.

And for more information on Bunny Delicious wedding stationery, visit bunnydelicious.com or follow @bunnydelicious on Twitter.

Perfect Wedding Hot Topic

The September 2010 issue of Perfect Wedding magazine has just hit the shelves, featuring Shelley’s expert opinion on the hot topic of whether it’s OK to ask your guests for money instead of a gift.

We were really honoured to be asked to contribute — and it was great to see that our debate opponent didn’t actually disagree too much with our view that what’s important to guests is the feeling that they’re giving you a special treat instead of having their gift measured only by the amount they’ve spent.

You can ask for money but still help your guests to feel that they’ve given you a really special, personal gift.

The new issue also features a 22-page special on weddings abroad, and a roundup of the world’s sexiest honeymoons. Check it out!

The Honeymoon Testers

Earlier this year, we were thrilled to learn that Mark and Denise Duffield-Thomas, who’d used our service for their wedding gift list, had won the Ultimate Job In The World competition. Organised by luxury honeymoon specialists Runaway Bride and Groom, the job entails travelling the world, trying out dream honeymoon locations, and blogging the results at thehoneymoontesters.com.

We asked Mark and Denise a few questions about their experiences as The Honeymoon Testers, their amazing world record attempt, and their own honeymoon to Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and Bali. Here’s their fantastic video response:

Thanks ever so much to Mark and Denise for taking the time to answer our questions in such detail, and for their kind words about Buy Our Honeymoon!

We never delete your honeymoon gift list, so you can always review your plans, even years later. Mark and Denise have been generous enough to allow us to show you their actual wedding list — it’s a brilliant example of our category, item photos and currency conversion features, and includes some wonderful charitable and eco gift donations mixed in with honeymoon experiences and accommodation.

You can keep track of Mark and Denise’s journeys at their blog, and on Twitter. We’d like to wish them every success with the Ultimate Job — and the very best of luck with their world record attempt!

Alternatives to PayPal

With Buy Our Honeymoon, your guests pay the value of their gifts to you directly. We don’t collect payment from your guests, and we don’t charge a commission on the gifts you’re given. This means your wedding gifts are totally secure, and available to you the moment they’re given.

Some of our customers choose to receive cash or cheques in a card on the day of their wedding, or leave details on making a balance transfer to their bank account, but the majority set up their honeymoon registry to allow guests to make an immediate online payment to them using a credit or debit card.

We’re occasionally asked whether we support any online payment systems other than PayPal for this. Although we’d love to, regrettably we currently can’t.

We need any online payment system we support to do the following:

  • It must allow individuals — not just businesses — to set up an account to receive credit card payments. This rules out all but a handful of payment service providers out there.
  • It mustn’t require guests to set up their own account in order to pay. If you follow our guide to setting up your PayPal account, your guests won’t need a PayPal account of their own.
  • It must permit use of an account to collect gift contributions. Google Checkout, for example, expressly forbids use of the service for “fund solicitations”, precluding its use for a honeymoon registry.

We’d very much like to be able to offer couples a choice of supported online payment systems, but we’ve yet to find anything other than PayPal which satisfies all three of the above requirements. If you know of a supplier we should look at, please do get in touch.

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