Are you getting married? Know someone?

Are you engaged to be married, or do you know someone who is? I’m contemplating a wedding website service, and I want to build it to the needs/desires of actual brides (and grooms, technically). I.e., over the next couple months, I want to build a few wedding websites running fancy custom software for free.

Here’s a profile of the sort of bride-to-be I’m looking for:

• Reasonably Internet-savvy
• Interested in giving feedback to help create a novel service that fits them just right
• Willing to live with a fairly plain design on the website for the first month or two
• Will try actually using this as it grows capabilities over the next two months
• Wedding date or personal interest compatible with actually using it over the next two months

The point of a wedding website (as I understand it, open to revision) is to provide a hub for wedding and couple information for these audiences: couple, wedding party, friends. Some features seem to fall out of that concept pretty obviously (and many already exist in competing products):

• Calendar of showers, parties, events, and of course the wedding itself.
• Links to gift registries.
• “Story of the couple”.
• Blog-type news posts, supporting polls for asking (e.g.) which bridesmaid dress style to use and comments because comments are fun. This seems rare in competitors—is that because real brides won’t use it, or because everyone’s product is just a copy of someone else’s?
• Photos!
  • Make it super-easy for brides to upload the official pics (engagement and/or wedding) I have it on good authority that the average pro photographer wishes the Internet and all its copyright-violating denizens would just go away, so they’re not likely to be on-board with this. I still have high hopes for making this rock, but I’m de-prioritizing support for professional photos. Everything else still applies.
  • Easy to add your own pics
  • URL to put in your program—If you took pictures at the wedding, please share them here!
  • Comments
  • How to organize all these photos? All the rest is just technology—I need actual brides to help figure out the best presentation.

There are a lot of wedding website services out there, but they’re mostly weak and copy-cat (or gratuitously flashy but useless). Especially when many of your friends and family live across the country and won’t make it to your wedding, I think there’s real value in something that can help collect the pieces of the experience in one place where everyone can share. Whether I can find any brides interested in helping make this will, I suppose, provide some indication of whether this is really a valuable service or not.

Any suggestions or corrections on service features, experience or business model are welcome. And bride-to-be referrals would be very welcome. Correspondence to joshua@letterblock.com on this one, please.

P.S. - Apologies for the exclusive bride focus of this post. Grooms are welcome too, and since I was the one who wrote the engagement page for my wife and myself (we didn’t have a wedding website), I should have known better.