New Wedding Program Fan Styles

Carlson Craft just this week released its new fan programs brochure, with some brand new wedding program fan styles, including one on recycled paper. They will be retiring the old brochures soon, as the new one has all the most popular styles in it plus a few new ones. The only bad news is that they have quadrupled the fee for having them assemble the fans. I used to charge $45 for 100, now they charge $45 for 25! I guess a lot more people will be assembling their own fans. It isn't hard to do, just a bit tedious. Here are some of the new styles. Our wedding fan program samples page continues to be popular, I had to demand a few sites take down images stolen from it they were using to sell their own homemade (laser printed) fan programs. Why they would try to sell their programs based on our artwork is beyond me, they don't have the same library of motifs and monograms that Carlson Craft has access to for us.

Changing Hosts for our Website

This weekend we are moving the whole website to a new internet host, Rackspace, which promises no downtime and 24/7 support. I have been really impressed with them so far.

We have tested the new site using the numerical URL (http://72.3.135.168) and it seems to be working, thanks to some help from a terrific programmer, Katie Grogan, who has helped me with my shopping cart over the years. Now we just have to swap out the numbers for the name throughout the site, and change the nameservers at the registrar, and hopefully it will be a smooth transition. We are doing it on Friday afternoon, to give us the weekend to fix anything that comes up.

This became necessary when we had 3 full days of time OFF LINE in March due to our current host, 1and1, which is terrible and I don't recommend to anyone. The only thing I can say about it is that it was cheap, but we have outgrown it. Rackspace is more than we really need, but I couldn't find a hosting provider in between in terms of price that could give me the uptime and service responsiveness that I need in order to sleep at night. So hopefully it will be a quiet weekend with no news to report as everything will go smoothly!

New napkin colors

We have new wedding napkin colors! Finally, an aqua is back! I was so excited to get the two new albums with new colors. Aqua, Marine (turquoise, basically), Mango, Magenta, Bay (a medium blue)--all brand new colors. Peach is not in any current album but they are still filling my orders for it, so we will see if it is soon discontinued. Below is our new bay color.

Survived the Move

Well we moved our family and thus this business from New Jersey to Maryland due to my husband's promotion to an inside-the-beltway job with the federal government. Thanks to my Cingular wireless on my handheld computer, I was able to keep up with my email and orders from Antonia Rose Printing for the week we were without high speed internet access. The wedding season has begun and orders are starting to pick up, especially for the fan programs. Our new house is in a rural part of Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay and we have a big yard for the kids. Best of all, there are other kids their age just down the road, no small thing when you are out in the country.

The latest excitement was when our website was down all day yesterday due to a server hardware problem. I was very unhappy that my host, 1and1.com, did not move it to a backup server but just left us offline for 10 hours until it was fixed. That was not a happy day! But we are good to go now.

Wedding Fan Programs still hot for 2007

Our wedding fan programs are still our hottest program format for the 2007 wedding season, with more photo ones being sold this year.

We are seeing a lot of creativity with color, too. On the photo wedding fan programs you can print the text in two different colors, so between the colors and the fonts you can really make a unique design.

Our prices are still below retail, though we have to limit it to one free proof now. The proofs are taking up to 3 days to turnaround, so many people don't have time for more than one proof anyway, not a big change for most customers.

Search engine placement work paying off!

What a busy summer! Our traffic is nearly triple that of last summer, so this one-woman shop has been hustling. Last winter we put up pages for regular wedding programs (in addition to the popular wedding fan programs we had been selling) and more content for printed napkins, and both those pages have taken off. We are top 5 for our target keywords in Yahoo and MSN and just broke top 10 for printed wedding programs in Google; wedding napkins is still at 12 or so. Neither existed a year ago, or were so far down I couldn't find them.

I haven't done much with our wedding planning sites, www.idoinmn.com and www.idoinnj.com, but I updated them a little bit this summer. I also added some content pages to the weddings area of my main site, new info on wedding invitation etiquette, writing your wedding programs, and save the date cards. There is a dearth of good information out there on these topics; most of the search results are just lists of sites where you can buy the stuff, not actual information. I think that is why our sample pages (for programs and program fans) are so popular--people want to see what others have done to get ideas.

As for Post-its, after slipping a bit in the rankings on Google for our main keywords (custom Post-its and personalized Post-its), we are back in the top five. Fewer people search for custom Post-its than for custom Post-it notes, but those who do, find us! The majority of the search results for either term are big companies that don't sell fewer than 500 pads anyway. (Those companies contract directly with 3M as their supplier, but 3M doesn't deal with the small orders themselves.) So our challenge is to help people find us. We plan on reworking the Post-its section some more this winter, as the wedding season slows down.

Post-it Note Business Cards are Getting Hot!

As the summer wears on we are selling more and more of the business card Post-it notes that were introduced this spring. They are a convenient size for coupons and of course perfect for business cards. I have been using them to attach a business card to a brochure I send out with samples, and they work great for that, no paperclips. Our

Busy Summer

Over a month since I've posted! We went to visit family for 3 weeks and I ran everything from the laptop at my brother's house, and it went just fine. The only problem was sending out samples, which I couldn't do for a few weeks. We just got back last weekend and it's been our busiest week ever.

Wedding programs continue to be hot for us, and I finally have worked out with my press a better way of getting the orders to them than faxing (copy comes out too light so they can't read it well) or their online ordering system (which for some unknown and mysterious reason takes 3 days longer than faxing). I got a real person's email address to just send in orders that way! What a relief for us, as the delay in getting proofs was really a problem.

Wedding Programs are taking off

We just started offering wedding programs (not wedding fan programs, but the regular kind)this springl and they are taking off fast. Most printers of wedding invitations don't have a large line of programs, and most people who carry the Regency programs (as we do), have them on a Regency affiliate site, not on their "regular" website, so they don't get indexed with the search engines and customers don't find them. I am really happy to say we have worked out some of the kinks of our new relationship with Regency and are getting a faster response to our orders, proof approvals and so on.

Valerie program, Tiffany program, Stephanie wedding program

On a different note, I discovered that Carlson Craft has another color of napkins we hadn't been offering. Antonia Rose Printing is a vacuum cleaner for personalization options on Carlson Craft items, offering more different monograms, motifs and fonts than anyone else we can find online. Every time we find something new in an album or online (on a competitor's site) that is an option, we add it to our site. In browsing competitor sites I saw peach printed napkins from Carlson Craft, so I called Carlson Craft and sure enough, they still offer them. They aren't in any of the 8 albums we have! But they are on our site now and we have already sold them twice in the 2 weeks they have been up!