Introducing wexii - connecting brides, wedding vendors and venues

We are extremely excited to introduce our latest project called Wexii, where brides are connected to vendors and venues in a social-networking platform.

We don't have industry experts writing blogs nor do we provide any wedding resources or planners; what we have are real brides and real weddings. Location-driven and venue-centric, Wexii provides an equal opportunity for all vendors to show off their work and get found by potential clients. You listing is never based on how much you pay. As a matter of fact, we do not accept payments from vendors, period.

See it for yourself by registering for a free account today. Experience the power of Wexii!

One-click System Backup

We have implemented a new feature -- one-click system backup.

You will be able to save a working HTML file that contains all potentials, to-dos, payments, and jobs (both weddings and non-weddings) to your own computer. The HTML file is navigable with menus and quick links.  It can be used as simply as a backup file or you can take it on the go where there is no internet access available.

You can find it under Control Panel, Account, System Backup.

The Four Pillars of A Wedding Photographer Business

There are four major elements that every wedding photographer must face when running a successful business.

First, a website. Simply put, you must have it. Not just to show your previous work, but also allow potential clients to find you and contact you. After all, majority of the brides start their photographer search from the web.

Second, a blog. This is optional but increasingly, it's become a great selling point. A blog complements your portfolio by showing off your latest work. Your portfolio could be the best of your work in the past ten years, but a blog proves you are able to consistently produce the same level of work wedding after wedding.

Third, a proofing gallery. This is where you will need to provide an online picture gallery for each wedding. More importantly it should have a built-in print and product ordering system so your clients and their guests can place print orders.

Fourth, a business management solution. This is an important piece of software that helps you manage your entire business -- contracts, payment, mileage, expense, tasks, shoots, equipments, etc, etc.

Getting all four is not a problem, there are plenty of providers for each. The problem is they are not connected, and you are dealing with four different companies. Typically you would need to get a website by either purchasing a template (Bludomain, PhotoBiz) or designing your own. Then you would need to integrate a blog (WordPress, Blogger). Matching the two would be a challenge. Some of the website templates come with proofing galleries but there are very limited functionalities and your print orders are nothing but an email notification. There are no manageability and traceability.

When it comes to business management, none of them are connected to any above elements. For example, when a potential client contacts you, you will need to manually enter his/her information in your business application; or wind up using a popup contact window provided by the application. The same applies to your print order where you need to manually transfer sales and cost information.

Weddx is the industry's first and only provider that solves this problem by integrating all systems into a single app. Not only are you dealing with one company for all your issues, all data are connected and shared seemingly.

A final note -- cost. To get all four different systems, you are looking at anywhere from $100 to $250 a month, not to mention some one-time fees. Designed from ground up, Weddx is able to leverage the latest technologies and offer the lowest monthly cost in the industry.

So sign up for a 30-day free trial and see what Weddx can do for you.

Three New Website Templates Added

We have added three new website templates, check them out:

Introducing Website and Blog

We are extremely excited to announce our latest product – website with integrated blog! 

Our website is database-driven, fast-loading, and comes with extensive capabilities that otherwebsite services do not provide. Please read key features at our website at http://www.weddx.com. 

We are the first software application that combines all aspects of your wedding and portrait photography business into a single service, all integrated without relying any third-party components. From website to blog, from proofing gallery to business management, Weddx is leading the industry with cutting-edge technologies and unparalleled features. All for extremely affordable low monthly fee. 

As always, we welcome your feature suggestions, questions and comments. Weddx has grown exponentially in the past year due to your continuous feedback, we greatly appreciate it! 

Do you think you've got a great website? Think again ...

One of the most important aspects of running a successful wedding photography business is the website. It's most likely how your potential clients find you, see your previous work, review detailed information, and of course, contact you.

So you spend several hundred dollars and purchase a website template, upload your images, and think you've got one of the best websites. If so, read on.

Recently Weddx picked 20 customers from its database, all wedding photographers, all curious about how their websites are doing as a marketing tool. Each photographer picked about 10 to 15 of their favorite clients for a survey. We have gathered 210 responses from brides. The photographers are geographically across US and so are their clients. The focus of this survey is all about wedding photographers' websites -- look and feel, navigation, ease of use, etc. To everyone's surprise, most reviews are negative, some received what we call a "disaster". Below are some responses from brides regarding different elements of the websites:

When asked about the use of music, an overwhelming 80% of the brides provided negative reviews, and 19% neutral, only 1% positive!

• "OMG, don't get me started on the music, I hate it. I don't know about other people, but I do my research at work and I always forgot to turn off the speaker!"
• "The first thing I do when I look at a photographer's website is to turn off the music. There are some websites that I can't even find a button or icon to do so, I leave the website immediately."
• "I can see sometimes I could maybe see myself enjoy the music, but what's the point? I didn't come to your website to enjoy the music, I want to see your work."
• "I once visited a local photographer's website and the song playing was the same song of my first dance with my husband. Well, that's not the problem, the problem is he is my ex-husband. He abandoned me! The music brought back all the horrible memories as I am looking to get married again. I had to close my browser. Please, don't use music. Thanks."

When asked about the use of flash, 58% provided negative reviews, 22% neutral, and 20% positive.

• "The problem I have with flash is its too fancy. When I click on a menu, some random things (not sure what it is) was flying across the screen, I just don't care, show me your pictures please!"
• "It's just too slow to load. At work, it's OK, but when I go home, I have a DSL connection through my phone company (guess not as fast as other cable?), the website took quite a while to load and I got impatient with many of them and never get to see their work."
• "Too many effects, too many sizzles, too many clicks to get through anything."
• "I am not totally against flash, but I can't handle the black background. I cannot read text against black background, it hurts my eyes."
• "Many times I wanted to show the website to my friends when we get together, my iPhone won't display flash!"

When asked about overall experience of using the websites, 42% provided negative reviews, 31% neutral, 27% positive:

• "Many times I was greeted with a starting page, I needed to either select website, or blog. Once in the website, I had no way of getting back to the starting page. Not a big problem, but why bother with a first page at all?"
• "There are three things I want to see, your previous work, your pricing information, and how to contact you. I don't care about anything else, and you wouldn't believe how hard it could be to get those three things. Very frustrated!"
• "Many of the photographers do not display any pricing information. I totally do not get that! Why? I had to send an email to ask for pricing. And some won't give me and ask for a meeting. Seriously, are we wasting our precious time and then realize you are just out of my budget range however you try to "arrange" your package for me? I did it with one photographer and never did it again. Actually, I got so mad and I skipped all without pricing information afterwards. At least give me a clue if not the full price list."
• "Many of the websites are extremely similar in styles, are they all designed by the same person?"
• "I always like to verify availability first, so I love the calendar. But one problem I had is clicks. My wedding was 12 months away, so I had to click 12 times before I see that month. Every click comes with this little "loading" thingy, the whole thing took like forever to finally get to it."

Hope you now have a clearer picture of what brides want and how your website serves them.

Stay tuned as Weddx is about to launch its own Website services with built-in integrated blogging.

Wedding Photography Workflow Management

Since our initial launch, workflow management has always been on our feature list. We are now proud to introduce the industry's first wedding photography workflow management solution!

For the longest time, wedding and portrait photographers face the tedious tasks of meetings, shoots, to-dos, notes, reminders, post-processing, etc, etc. The wedding day coverage seen by the clients is less than 25% of the total work involved for any given wedding.

Weddx started out by providing a great tool to help photographers manage these tasks more efficiently. Workflow Management component just extended such efficiency exponentially.

For the first time, you can define your own actions based on system events. Once defined, these actions would occur automatically, completely simplifying your entire daily business.

The system events you can currently attach an action to include:

• When a new inquiry is added
• When a meeting with a potential client is scheduled
• When a wedding contract is signed (either manually added or digitally signed in ClientAccess)
• When a contract payment is due
• When a shoot/meeting is scheduled (this could be an engagement session, bridal session, etc.)

For each event, you can define the following actions:

• Send an email
• Send a text message
• Add a to-do task

For each action defined, you can:

• Execute the action immediately
• Execute the action after certain time after the event is triggered
• Execute the action based on a future date (wedding date, meeting date, etc)

Here are some example workflows you can define:

• Send a text message to my phone whenever a wedding contract is signed
• Schedule a reminder email to be sent out 5 days after a new inquiry is added to the system to check on the status of the inquiry
• Send a reminder email 7 days before any contract payment is due
• Add a specific to-do task whenever a meeting is scheduled in the system
• Send an email one year after the wedding date to congratulate your clients on their first anniversary

The combination of actions and events and how it works to fit your own style is limitless. Plus, you can use variables in your action so your message is dynamic to the specific event. For example, your reminder email could look like this:

Contract Payment Due in Two Weeks -- {Wedding.Name}.

Amount Due: {Contract.PaymentAmount}

Due Date: {Contract.PaymentDueDate}

Login to Weddx, go to Control Panel, and see it for yourself.