Talk:Personal wedding website

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[edit] Wedding statistics

There's a section that says:

In 2007 there are expected to be 2.29 million weddings in the United States alone. According to a survey by TheKnot.com, 65 percent of respondents indicated intent to create their own wedding website. Top reasons cited for creating the site included listing wedding day details and making online gift registries available to guests.

(I added the in the US alone" wording.) I presume this is in here to give the reader some idea about the number of individual wedding sites that are likely to be created, but I don't think it's reliable and the paragraph ought to come out. This is because the Knott poll is simply a self selecting sample of already web-inclined people and the Knott has a huge self interest in promoting high numbers in this regard (since they provide the service free to increase their audience for their customers). The estimate of weddings seems like a reasonable source (official industry based market research tends to be reasonably accurate) but that data is irrelevant without the percentage data. Does anyone know of a more reliable replacement for the knott data? Or another, better source that we could use? If not I think the whole prargraph needs to come out.

We could also use statistics on other countries - is this an entirely US phenomenon? Is it more prevalent or different in the UK? Japan? Brazil? etc. Thanks -- Siobhan Hansa 08:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Response to Wedding statistics

Yeah, I agree that the Knot's poll is far from a stratified random sample. But I don't think it's devoid of any informational value and think it's better than providing no hard data at all for the potential number of wedding website users. I agree that the poll represents a web-savvy group which may be misrepresentative of the wedding industry as a whole, but I don't think the Knot has a "huge self interest in promoting high numbers". How would this help them? At any rate, I have not been able to locate any better stats, but I'll keep looking. --Weddingexpert 20:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The Knott has a vested interest in promoting high numbers because it implies to users that everyone is doing it and they should too. Getting users to use their tools is in the Knott's financial interest because it brings users back to their site where they will view the listings and ads that bring in the Knott's revenue. That's one of the reasons sites like that do those sorts of polls and promote the results when they find it useful.

Hard data would be good. Unfortunately the poll doesn't provide hard data. That sort of poll is only useful for entertainment value (and, obviously, marketing!). The juxtaposition of the poll with the good data on anticipated weddings implies that 65% of those weddings will have associated personal websites. There is no justification for giving that impression and the inclusion amounts to original research. No data is better than demonstrably bad data. -- Siobhan Hansa 00:33, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External Link Policy

I scanned the external link policy and while I didn't read it thoroughly I didn't quite catch why the last link that I included was invalid. I don't necessarily think that every wedding website company out there should be included on the page... Wikipedia is not a directory, I get that. I noticed you SiobhanHansa deleted a link from JustProposed.com. I agree with that. But the site I linked to compares a bunch of them side by side and offers reviews in the event that someone was looking for one. Perhaps I should have linked here http://www.weddingwebsites.com/compare.php? --Weddingexpert 20:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

So my thinking on that link went like this: It's not a well known or widely respected site, there's no provenance on the site, there's no indication of how the sites are chosen for comparison. And more importantly, the site doesn't tell us about the subject of personal wedding websites, comparison shopping isn't encyclopedic. As well as not being a directory, we're also not a portal or a place to come for recommendations. -- Siobhan Hansa 00:53, 16 February 2007 (UTC)