We’ve been pretty quiet this summer, but that’s because we’ve been very busy working on some features that we think you’ll REALLY like.  Make sure you stay tuned to this blog, or our facebook page in the coming months as we roll out a lot of exciting new things! 

The first thing that we’d like to announce is that we now have regularly updated and verified discounts and coupon codes in our wedding_vendor_directory.  You will regularly be able to save between 5-20% just by clicking on the links and entering the coupon codes if you buy something through one of these stores!

This is just another step in our mission to help you plan, share, and remember your special moments.  We want you to be able to find the best vendors, and the best deals.

As of today, guests can now subscribe to your wedding website and receive an email with a summary of what’s new on any day that you update your website.  Read how to do it here.

We’re really excited about this update. We found that with our own wedding websites we were constantly updating it with information but worrying about how often people were checking it. Now we don’t have to worry about that. Now, when we post some new pictures, some new bit of information, or if one of our guests asks us a question that everyone will be interested in, then any guests that have subscribed to the mailing list will get notified. This all happens without any work required. You don’t need to send out the updates. They are sent out automatically!

We really believe this makes your wedding website much more of a communication tool. Again, using the team here as an example, whenever we want to send out info to our guests we now think about putting it on our website first, rather than going to email.

So, how does it work? If you have a ‘What’s New’ element on your page there is now a place for guests to enter their name and email address to subscribe. You can see/manage who has subscribed by email by clicking on the new ‘Subscribers’ link at the top of your website. You can also disable this option by changing the settings of the ‘What’s new’ element. Read all the details in this new ‘how-to’ article.

In our previous blog article we wrote about how to share your MomentVille wedding website updates on Facebook.  Using our recently launched wedding website activity feeds you can now share your MomentVille updates on a number of different services.

Another popular service is Friendfeed.  Friendfeed lets you and others stay up-to-date on web pages, photos, videos and music that you or your friends and family are sharing.  It groups together updates from various sites all in one place.

To learn how to share you MomentVille updates on Friendfeed check out our new how-to article.

After our recent launch of wedding website activity feeds we have been working on tutorials for using those activity feeds on other websites such as Facebook. If you want to have information posted to your Facebook profile when you make updates to your MomentVille wedding website, here’s how to do it.

There are 2 different ways to update your Facebook profile via MomentVille. Both work fine so it’s up to you to decide what you want. The first imports your updates as ‘notes’ into your mini-feed so they are listed with other events in your mini-feed. The second groups all of your MomentVille updates into 1 section of your profile. This requires installing an application.

Both ways are described in detail in this how to article: http://www.momentville.com/learn/how_to/share_on_facebook

MomentVille is today announcing the launch of activity feeds for your wedding websites! We have long felt that your wedding website should be more than just a place to put your photos and stories. We feel it should also be used as a way of effectively communicating with your guests!

We recently launched a ‘What’s New’ element which lets visitors to your website see what’s been changed recently. With the new activity feeds your guests can begin to follow you updates without need to keep checking your website for updates. Instead they can get notified about the updates!

Your wedding website’s ‘activity feed’ uses something called RSS (really simple syndication). To see what it looks like go to www.momentville.com/<your_site>/feed/site

To see an example check out this feed: http://www.momentville.com/wedding_example/feed/site

If someone has an RSS feed reader they can easily subscribe to your updates. More excitingly, it is also possible to use this feed to update your profile on other sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, and others. Just imagine how great it would be to have your Facebook profile updated when you make changes to your MomentVille wedding website! We’ll be writing new how-to articles about that in the coming days so stay tuned!

MomentVille is constantly adding new themes and features.  Naturally, we want to make sure that everyone knows about these.  This will allow you to make use of all these great features for your wedding websites.

In order to let you follow our updates in the way that you prefer, we are today announcing new ways to learn about what’s new on MomentVille. There are a number of options to choose from, so pick your favorite!

Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MomentVille/28036723048

Follow us on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/momentville

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MomentVille

Follow us by RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MomentVille

Follow us by email: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1409389&loc=en_US

We have some exciting news coming soon so stay tuned!

Today we’re excited to announce a ‘What’s New’ element is now available for your wedding websites! This new type of element is available to add anywhere, on any page on your website, just like every other element.

The new ‘What’s New’ element is very special. It keeps track of the 10 most recently updated elements on your website and lists them all in one place, automatically! What does this mean? Well, suppose you change some detail about your reception, or have added a new picture. Instead of everyone having to go through your whole site just to see if anything is new, they can now see very clearly what has changed, and when it changed.

We believe this makes your wedding website much more useful to your guests and it becomes very easy for them to see what you’ve changed. You can add a ‘What’s New’ to any web page on your wedding website but we recommend putting it on your first page.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

We recently launched a new approval feature that is available to all premium and free wedding website users. When a guest posts a comment to your wedding website via a guestbook, questions and answers element, or RSVP, you can now require that you must approve it before it is shown to other guests on your wedding website.

Your wedding website is a place for you to share information with your guests, but also a place for your guests to interact with you. When someone leaves a comment on your website, it currently goes through a commercial spam filter. This ensures that the comment is not spam. If it passes the spam filter it is shown on your website.

What if, however, you have a friend that has a ‘unique’ sense of humor and makes a comment on your wedding website that you’d rather not have your other guests see? Well, now you can deal with this situation.

On your wedding website details page select the option pictured below. Once selected, guest comments will not be shown to other guests until you approve them.

When you have a comment to approve you will see something that looks like the image below. The comment will be surrounded with yellow and have 3 buttons for you to choose.

The ‘Approve’ button marks the comment as okay and it is shown to your other guests. The ‘Delete’ button deletes the comment. The ‘Mark As Spam’ button tells our spam filters that you think the comment is spam. This means our spam filters are more likely to block a similar comment in the future.

In our continuing effort to provide you with the information you need, we have added a new bit of information to your wedding website. From now on, in the top left of the ‘user area’ (the bar that appears on top of your website when you are logged in) you will see an indicator showing the amount of storage you have used. This information had not previously been available to users.

Our free wedding websites now come with 50MB of free photo storage. When you upgrade your wedding website to our premium option you will have 500MB of photo storage available! It is very rare for someone to go beyond this amount of storage. (Rest assured, however, if it is needed we will find a way to provide it!)

We’d also like to take a moment and explain a little bit more about how photos work. For the majority of our wedding website users, all they need to know is that they can upload a photo to a Photo element, a Photo & Text element, or a Photo Album element. In essence, that’s the easiest use of photos. Each time you upload a photo it is uploaded to your website account. You can view the photos associated with your wedding website by going to http://www.momentville.com/my/photos (you need to be logged in to see this).  When you delete a photo on your website, it isn’t deleted in your account.  This allows you to reuse the same photo more than once, for example, when using the new image feature in the advanced text editor.  If you want to delete some photos permanently you’ll need to delete them from you /my/photos page.

We’ll be writing more helpful article about photos, widgets, and other features in the coming months.  We’ve  also got some exciting new features for your wedding websites coming down the pipe which we are very excited about (and think you will be too).  Stay tuned and keep the requests coming!

We are constantly striving to find the perfect balance between making sure information is easy to access, and making sure that the focus remains where it should be: on your special moments!

Currently, at the bottom of your wedding website pages you see a number of links.  In particular, there are links to how-to articles, demo videos, and other resources to help you learn about how to get the most out of your wedding website.  Many of these links are probably extraneous for your wedding guests, so, we are moving to a more lean set of information that will be shown to your guests, while maintaining the easy access to information for you.

We feel this new balance makes sure you can get the information you need about making your own wedding website, while your guests get the information they need about your wedding.