Wedding planning, week four
Planning a wedding isn't too difficult.  We have contacts out with people who take pictures, make cakes and play music.  We just need to choose one of each.  We are going to attend the caterer's open house and tasting on March 20 to pick our food, and we've signed up for a Costco membership which will save us money on just about everything.  We also have an idea about how to arrange and decorate the space.  We have identified our bridal party, best man, groomsman & groomsmaid, flower girls, and ring bearer.  Emily is shopping for dresses and I've met with the tuxedo people.  It is really all coming together.  We still need to choose an officiant and script our ceremony, which is probably the next "hard" part.  Oh, and we should actually invite people at some point which will require us to agree on wedding invitations--that should be, um, fun.  Wink.

The amazing thing, to me, is still the prices people are charging for their services.  For example, we've seen DJs charging $1500-2000 for five hours of service.  I'd like to get paid $400 per hour to stand there and play music and occasionally make an announcement.  The wedding industry is good business.

On that note, I'm becoming more and more convinced that there is a lot of money to be made in "filtering" the noise from all of these providers.  Most of the wedding planning websites like theknot.com are taking money from providers for "featured placement" and just generally not being helpful to users beyond getting us to click on advertisements and buy stuff we don't need.

My dream wedding planning website would let me filter a list of venues by zip code (so that a search for venues in Seattle doesn't include everything in Washington State) and size (so that I can find a venue that will hold 200 people without wasting my time on those that won't).  I'd love to search a list of hotels in Seattle that offer honeymoon suites and/or packages.  The site would require providers to enter information that other sites do not require--for example, if you are a photographer and you want to be listed on my site, you'd need to provide your detailed price list and sample photos and be prepared to be listed along with other photographers who have provided the same information.  Users would have profiles and would be allowed to submit reviews so that eventually the "highest rated" wedding officiant in the Seattle area would be known.

Sadly, the only way for such a site to make money would be (you guessed it) Google ads and/or featured placement from providers which sort of defeats the whole purpose.  So I think I'll just keep selling books and stuff for now.