My Kate Parker Wedding | Wedding Planning for Couples and Vendors

I have recently had the privilege of speaking with Stacy Keenan over at My Kate Parker Wedding about the possibility of getting on board with the great new vendor directory site designed by the founder of Kate Parker Weddings.  This is not just any old vendor directory.  You might be familiar with The Knot which has become widely popular among wedding planning couples and vendors.  The Knot has continued to be a great source for wedding inspiration, budget ideas, searching for vendors, and connecting with other brides who are in the middle of planning the biggest day of their lives.  In recent years The Knot, as good as it is, has become saturated with a broad range of vendors and images that can leave those planning a wedding a little (or very) overwhelmed.  Where do you even start and once you have gone through a ton of options for vendors and ideas what have you actually accomplished?  There is no way to easily sort through each vendor by immediately removing those that are out of your budget.  Yes you can look for those vendors that range in what you might be interested in spending, but is that a realistic amount for your overall budget?  At My Kate Parker Wedding you will choose your top budget for your wedding when you register and then you will have the ability of seeing only those vendors that fit in your budget in your area.  You will then have the assistance of the budget calculator that will suggest to you how much you should be spending in certain areas and you can put in what you have spent so you can see where you sit overall.

More great tools for planning couples include a to-do list, an online community, galleries and inspiration tools, and real weddings!  When planning your wedding you will have the ability to use the pre-made to-do list that has a list of things that you would want to accomplish.  You have the ability to arrange them in the order you want, check them off, edit them, remove or add new ones, and categorize them.  There is an online community of other vendors and couples planning their wedding that you can go to for advice, support, and ideas!  There are galleries and inspiration boards that you can search through using customizable search tools for the season, color, or style of wedding you might be looking for.

For vendors in the wedding industry your potential clients will be able to find you and know that you fit right in their appropriate budget.  One great thing for vendors is that myKPW will not be saturated with tons of vendors.  They are limiting the number of vendors for each category in each budget area for each market.  Does that make sense?  Basically they want to only work with the best and to offer the best choices to their couples who are planning weddings so they can easily find the best photographer, caterer, wedding planning, or reception site for them!  Vendors will also have the ability to customize their profile by adding images, contact information, blogging, and adding advice for other couples to read.  Vendors can track the viewing of their profile by seeing the number of hits and where those hits are coming from.

Homepage

Galleries

Featured Weddings

Expert Advice

Stacy provide for me some great information about what this site can offer to the couples using it.  myKPW is completely customizable starting with the two sign up requirements- what state are you getting married in and what is your overall wedding budget?

• The four wedding budget brackets for the site are: under 25k, 25-50k, 50-80k and 80k and up
• Once you’re logged into the site, you can always change your state and budget to search and explore other vendors, photos, inspirations, etc.
• We hand-select each and every vendor and limit each category to 4 vendors- simply because I give my clients 3 options to check out and if they don’t like those I send them 3 more…. 9 times out of 10 they go with the fourth vendor… great market research as to how many vendors you should check out!
• Everything on the site is customizable by color, season, style and vendor category.
• Everything on the site has been tagged by color, season, style, and vendor so you can click on any photo, video, and audio clip on the site and see who created the item and all of its descriptions.
• Vendors can upload unlimited photos, audio and video clips so you get the most up-to date content available.  That’s right, I trust my high quality vendors and I want them to showcase their work the way they want to show it, not the way I think you want to see it.
• You can browse, galleries, expert advice articles, featured weddings, and inspiration boards to find your daily wedding inspirations.
• You can blog on the site, sharing your wedding planning experience with your friends and family. You can save any image on the site directly to your blog, any expert advice articles, featured weddings, and inspiration boards as well.
• You can create your own inspiration boards using the photos on the site within your state and budget, giving you ATTAINABLE inspiration.
• Coming soon, and I mean within the next few days, you will have your own budget page.  SImply put in your total budget and myKPW spits out the approximate industry standard breakdown of your vendor categories.  You’ll see it in a pretty graph, actual dollar signs, and as a percentage.  Add in your ACTUAL spending and a second pretty graph appears, showing you if you’re over or under budget, and it will also show you that in dollar signs, and as a percentage. Pretty slick, right?  Totally relating to your personal funds.
• Also coming soon, you will have your to do list.  I don’t think we should tell you what you need to do month to month as you might have 2 months 2 years to plan your wedding.  I simply give you a list of all the things you should be thinking about, in the order of importance that I tell my clients.  You can renumber and rearrange the list with a simple drag and drop of your mouse, add your own items, put your own notes in, check items off when they’re done, even remove any items that might not pertain to your planning experience.
• The myKPW community lets you share your information with the other users within your state and budget.  You can upload a profile pic, put in your style, season and colors of your wedding, put in your wedding date, and start saving your favorite images and blog from time to time.  If you chose to be a part of the community, your profile will be seen next to everyone else’s so you can read each other’s blog, learn about their experiences, comment on photos they’ve saved, posts you like, really helping to connect people with similar planning processes.  We’re all about family at myKPW, so it made perfect sense for us to include our users in such a community as well!
• Finally, in the spirit of the wonderful world of social media, you have the ability to share all of this information with your family, friends, bridal party, etc etc.  You can Facebook, Twitter and Share almost every piece of info and every image on the site, allowing quick communication with the people who need to see what you’re doing.

I hope that you will be just as excited as I am once you get over to myKPW to see how it will revolutionize the planning industry for couples and vendors!  If you want to get on board contact me and I will send you over to Stacy where she will go over all the awesome stuff that you already know!

And I will leave you with a FUN photo from a beach engagement session I got to do last weekend in Pensacola!!  Blog post coming soon!