Introducing wexii - connecting brides, wedding vendors and venues

2011-02-28T19:06:00.000-05:00

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

2010-12-26T15:40:00.001-05:00

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

2010-12-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-28T10:23:00.000-05:00

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

Introducing Website and Blog

2010-11-04T17:51:00.002-04:00

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 ...

2010-10-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

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

2010-08-22T11:04:00.002-04:00

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}

To-Dos Added to Mobile App

2010-08-17T16:26:00.000-04:00

We have added To-Dos list to the iPhone/Mobile app. It will includes the latest 30 To-Dos, from both Inquiries and Jobs. Check it out!

Dashboard Management

2010-08-05T22:07:00.000-04:00

We have implemented a new feature "Dashboard Management" that allows you to control which module to be displayed at which position. There are 9 positions to choose from, 3 each rows for 3 rows. If you have a small screen, you may want to only display 2 modules per row. Or you may want to hide some modules you may not want to see.

Scroll to the bottom of the Dashboard page, and click on the Manage link. Or go to Control Panel, Settings, Dashboard.

Color Coding Jobs

2010-07-21T21:46:00.001-04:00

We have added a new feature which allows you to specify a color to a job, whether it's a wedding or a non-wedding job. When jobs are displayed in the grid, the selected color will be used as the row background color. This, together with Tag, gives you the power to categorize your jobs in your own way.

You can find this feature on the main job page, next to the job name.

We have also enhanced the Wedding Search in the right panel. It's changed to "Job Search" to include both wedding and non-wedding jobs. And it's a combination of drop-down list and free-text search, which means you can either select a job from the drop-down list or start typing to search for existing jobs.

Communication Log

2010-07-21T13:15:00.000-04:00

We have added a new tool called Communication Log. This tool allows you to record your communications with your client, whether it's email, phone, in personal or other methods. It includes the time and details of the communication.

Go to the job page, click on the Misc tab.

Email Marketing Email Engine

2010-07-16T21:31:00.002-04:00

Our Email Marketing continues to be one of the most desired features! We have implemented some changes that will significantly improve deliverability of your lead emails.

One of the biggest problems when sending hundreds or even thousands of lead emails at one time is deliverability -- many free email services like Hotmail or Gmail considers these as Spam and the actual email message goes straight to the user's Spam/Junk folder or is never delivered.

We have updated our DNS record to ensure our forward DNS lookup matches our reverse DNS lookup. Basically this means when you get the IP address of our domain Weddx.com and when you reverse the IP address back to the domain name, they match. This is one of the conditions some email server will use to determine spam emails.

We have also changed how emails are sent. Previously, we send all emails immediately. Some email server sees high volume emails in a short period of time as spam. We now queues your emails first, and then only send up to 20 emails to the same email server. This significantly improves deliverability.

The only drawback is time. Previously, 100 emails will only take about 5 seconds to send. Now, it may take 5 minutes to send. But we feel the slight delay is justified. After all, you paid for these leads and if they don't get delivered, it's a waste.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Opening Up to International Countries

2010-07-15T21:11:00.000-04:00

We have just opened up our registration to International countries other than US and Canada! If you do not see your country in the list, please contact us for further assistance.

Please note the application will still use English as the main language. However, date/time value as well as currencies will be localized based on country selection.

Picture Categories in Proofing Gallery

2010-06-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

We have added a new enhancement that allows you to create categories for all the pictures in a proofing galleries. It's your choice to name the categories, but typically, categories could be like "Getting Ready", "Ceremony", and "Reception".

Pictures will then be filtered by these categories so your clients won't need to scroll through the entire picture gallery to find the one they want.

Google Translation

2010-05-20T09:06:00.000-04:00

We have added Google Translation script to ClientAccess and Gallery. If your clients speak foreign languages, the scripts allow instant translation of the page powered by Google.

To-Do

2010-05-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

We have implemented a new feature called To-Do. It is under both Pre-Wedding and Post-Wedding tab.

To-Do allows you to add your own tasks that you would like to perform in addition to the products and services in the contract. This can be a phone call, an email, a trip to the lab, or whatever.

It is directly integrated with the Upcoming Tasks and Past Due Tasks so you will see a single list of all the to-do items. Once you mark the to-do task as completed, it will be removed from the Upcoming Tasks/Past Due Tasks list.

More User Restrictions

2010-04-27T14:10:00.000-04:00

We have enhancement and provided more user restrictions. When setting up a new user, you have the option to restrict the user to only see his/her own jobs (jobs that are assigned to the user).

Now, you have more restrictions:

Restrict access to financial data -- even if the job is assigned to the user, if this option is checked, he/she will not be able to see any financial data related to the jobs including contract, payments, and ClientAccess.
Restrict access to Control Panel -- block access to the entire Control Panel module
Restrict access to Potentials -- block access to Potentials so users can't view/add potentials to the system
Restrict access to Reports -- block access to all reports
Restrict access to Proofing Gallery -- block access to all proofing galleries. This includes the Gallery tab for the job and the Proofing Gallery module.

Update

2010-04-24T00:20:00.000-04:00

We have made some updates --

When you use the Availability Checker feature in the right panel, we now includes any calendar events scheduled for that date on the calendar for all users.
We've added a new capability to allow you to fully manage how you want your date to be available or not available when using our availability API. Click on Manage link and you can now set any date as not available. This is totally independent from your bookings or calendar events, you set whatever dates as you wish. We do, however, make wedding bookings not available by default.
We have added a new field in contract template -- Location. You can use this field to display the location/city of the wedding in your contract. Use tag {Contract.Location} in your template.

Changes to Availability Checker

2010-04-22T22:08:00.000-04:00

We have made some changes to how the Availability Checker feature works in the right panel. Previously, we check for wedding bookings for the currently logged-in user. However, this present some issues like is the user still available if he/she has a non-wedding job? What about two small weddings?

Instead of simply displaying "available" or not, we now display the entire booking record for all users for the given date -- how many weddings and non-weddings are booked for each user. Now it's up to you to decide how you want to use this information.

Email Marketing Enhancement

2010-04-20T21:06:00.000-04:00

Our Email Marketing tool has increasingly become one of the most favorite features of all! In case you are not taking advantage of it, it allows you to send lead emails by using templates and settings. No need to type them anymore, all your need is the bride's email address. Plus, it allows you to keep track of when the recipient clicks on the link to visit your website. It also allows you to upload CSV files which you might have obtained from your advertising effort.

We have made two new enhancement to this feature:

Your settings (From Name, From Email, Subject, etc) will now be remembered. Next time when you send a new email, previous settings will be restored so you do not need to make changes every time.
When uploading CSV file, we used to require a fixed column header. You now can upload files with any column headers in any order. You have the ability to map your columns to the three required columns -- Email, Name, and Wedding Date. Still, Email is the only column required.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Labeling the bride and the groom in contract

2010-04-14T10:16:00.000-04:00

We have implemented a update that allows you to label the two people who would be signing the contract. Currently, it's "The Bride" and "The Groom" and you have no other options. This update allows you to rename these two titles.

For example, you might rename them to "Teen" and "Parent" and use the contract for a "sweet 16" shoot.

Go to Control Panel, Settings, Contract Template, you should see two new entries for this purpose.

Tip: Add a Pre-Wedding Consultation

2010-03-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

Many of you provide a consultation service approximately 30 days prior to the wedding to go over wedding day details. You may also provide a meeting after the wedding to go over print ordering, album selection, etc.

This can be managed by making them a product/service you offer, just like an engagement session or an album. Add this to your "Package Content" under Control Panel, they will be available when you create a contract. Check the checkbox for this meeting and they will then show up under Pre-Wedding (or Post-Wedding) tab depends on how you set it up.

You may also want to configure your wedding packages to include these so it's automatically checked for you when preparing a contract.

Vendor Management

2010-03-21T12:32:00.000-04:00

We are excited to announce Vendor Management!

This feature allows you to add your vendors, labs, etc to Weddx including their name, email, phone, website, etc. You can also record your login information (username and password) as well.

With this feature, we have enhanced how you mark a product as "Completed". Before, all you can do is to mark it as complete by entering a date and a note. Now, you have the capability to enter multiple actions associated with a product or a service. Let's use an album as an example -- the first thing you will probably need to do is to obtain a list of pictures client wants to be used in the album. You can now add a new action and assign the "Next Step" to client and enter a note "Waiting for client to get back to me with list of desired pictures". After you receive the list and designed album, you can then again enter a new action like "Send design proof to client and wait for approval.". After approval, you upload them to your lab. A new action can be created to assign the Next Step to the vendor/lab in the dropdown list.

This way, you are completely in control exactly where the job is currently at and who's responsible for the next action.

In addition, you can view all pending jobs by vendor in Control Panel.

Take a look and let us know what you think!

(P.S. These vendors should be the labs/vendors you sent your product to (album, prints, etc), they should not be confused with wedding vendors like flower, cake, DJ, etc.)

User Restriction

2010-03-17T18:08:00.000-04:00

We have released the first part of user permission control - User Restriction. This feature allows an administrator to restrict a staff photographer to only see jobs assigned to him/her.

Go to Control Panel, Users, and Edit. You will see a check box to enable this restriction.

We are planning on a more advanced user permission control that will allow you to fully customize permissions on every page throughout the entire application.

Automatic Sales Tax Calculation

2010-03-14T12:04:00.000-04:00

We have added a small enhancement that enables automatic sales tax calculation when you are preparing or creating a contract. All you have to do is to go to Control Panel, Account, and set your Sales Tax Rate.

Once this is set, when you enter a contract amount, the sales tax amount will be automatically calculated based on the sales tax rate. This is not done behind the scene, Weddx is simply filling out the sales tax textbox for you so you still can manually change the value if desired.