Wedding Plans: Can You Really Organise A Wedding Using The Internet?

Think of any business name or any service you know of. Now open a web page to a search engine and type in what you came up with. Voila! A million results and most probably, (If you typed a business name) the business’ Website.

For example, I love Jelly beans. I also obsess about buying a plasma TV. So, I’m going to do 2 product searches. For a business search, I will randomly select a business from the yellow pages and search for it by typing the business name. I will now perform 3 searches:

1.“Jelly Beans”
2.“Plasma TV”
3.Randomly selected business name

Ok, here were my results:

1. The “Jelly bean” search brought me 10,200,000 results! Of course I was bored after the first page, but I found what I was looking for-the official Jelly Belly website. There were other various suppliers listed in the sponsored links along the top and right hand side, some selling the original Jelly Belly Jelly beans. I looked at them all to compare prices.

2. The “Plasma TV” search brought me 76,100,000 results! The first page consisted of the major high street stores, comparison website links and a few manufacturer website links. If I had searched “32” plasma TV” the results would have been more specific.

3. I performed 5 business name searches. 4 of the 5 names searched produced results in the top 10 listings and 3 of the 5 names searched produced sponsored links for that company.

RESULTS: Any business owner with half a brain will list their information, in some form, on the internet!

So now we know….Everyone is on the internet…nothing new really. But to answer the big question of “Can you really organise a wedding using the internet?” I would have to say YES!

I know this because I’m doing it myself. I’m getting married next year and I’m making a point of sourcing all of my information from the internet. There are so many companies out there-it’s unbelievable. The Wedding business is still big and everyone wants to make money off you, which is why you must seriously shop around before making any choices.

Here is an example: I myself work as a wedding singer, my fiancé as a wedding DJ, so we both know a fair bit about the business. My fiancé has seen her share of bad singers and bands. I have worked with more ‘cheesy DJ’s’ than I care to remember. The last thing either of us want for our evening reception is bad entertainment.

What we do is this:

1. Type in key phrases through a search engine like “Wedding bands in North Wales” or “Wedding DJ in Chester”. We do this a number of times with different key phrases as we may get varied results each time. We look at the sponsored links as they will pick up on the key phrases.

2. Visit websites, listen to audio samples and log the results in a database.

3. Contact the various entertainers for availability, prices, audio samples and repertoire-I personally do this by email as I don’t like to be hassled afterwards.

4. When we’ve narrowed it down to a few we’ll see if we can watch them in action, or at least get some more info on them from another source, i.e. References or reviews.

…And then we’re satisfied!

This sounds like a lot of work, but I always think it’s better to be thorough. You’re always going to be taking a chance, whether booking online or in a shop, but you’ll get a lot less fed up flicking through internet pages than you will carting yourself around shops all day.

Recently I’ve been looking for a photographer. I’ve found so many that are charging £800+, another lot that want around £500 and few that will do it for £300-£400. Everyone naturally thinks that the photographers who charge £300-£400 will surely not be as experienced as the ones asking for £800+.

I don’t think that this is the case. There will be a percentage that can do a fantastic job and only charge £300. Same will go for the other 2 categories. The motive for charging large fees is this: They can!

I don’t believe that it necessarily reflects their service; so much as it does their business sense.

When we come to choose a photographer we want to be sure that we have looked at all of the options, and then use our judgment to make the choice.

Using the internet you can look at many more options than if you were browsing the high street or the yellow pages directory. Plus, you’ll save a packet, which means more money for the honeymoon!