Weddingbee boards

Hello Hive!

While I was wedding planning, I fell in love with this place - not just for the welcoming and helpful nature of the other posters, but also because of how much information there is here. Seriously, these boards house invaluable discussions of etiquette, trends and traditions, relationship advice, dress inspiration and, well, all the info you need to plan a wedding!

But without organization, it all falls apart. Since the Hive is constantly growing and gaining new members, I thought it might be helpful to point out some features of the site that you might miss at first. Using these features will help you find things more easily - and help others too! 

The Boards

Not just the boards section, but each individual board. On the main page, you see all the posts, but over time, we've added separate boards for all sorts of things. If you're looking for dress or ring photos to drool over, you can check out the dress and ring boards. If you're feeling burnt out on wedding planning and just want to talk about your dog, you can check out the pets board. And if you're struggling to figure out just how you should word your RSVPs so no one brings along their neighbor, you can check out the Etiquette board!

Of course, not all boards are as straight forward - the Paper board, for instance, encompasses everything from fonts to stamps, from invitations to thank you notes - and all the menus, escort cards, programs and other papery goodness in between! Most boards have a brief description at their top if you visit that specific board.

Every time you make a post, it goes onto one of those boards - although a lot of them end up in the Beehive, which is meant to be for posts that don't fit anywhere else. Then, our Hostess team has to move all those posts (at 400 pages in the beehive, you can see we're a little behind!). The Beehive is great as a catchall for loose ends, but normal posts can get lost there - if I read about a first dance song at work, and go back later to find it so I can listen to the youtube clip at home, if it's not in Music or Dance, it's lost to me. 

So how can you help, and make sure your post ends up where you want it, instead of in the beehive?  There are two ways to post to a specific board. 

First, if you're on the main page looking at posts, and you click "Write a Post", your post will default to the beehive - to change that, just look for the dropdown menu under the text box and select the appropriate board. Simple!

Second, if you're viewing a specific board and click "Write a Post" it will place the post on that board automatically. So if you've been reading the Intimacy board, and then decide to write a post about your Nana, your post will end up in the wrong place!

Sorting your own posts will help your post get more relevant comments, and it will make it easier for others to find when they want to read about something on that topic! 

Tags

A lot of you blog, so you know how awesome Tags are. I love the tags feature here on the boards too! You can enter tags on any of your posts. You can also click on a tag on any post and see lots more posts on that topic! 

A tag, if you're not familiar, is just a short, usually 1-2 word, description of the content of a post. A post can have lots of tags, all of which work together to explain the content of that post. On Weddingbee, tags help drive the Related posts you'll see at the bottom of most threads, and the search results you see!

Our search bar doesn't always give the most recent search results first, but a tag will! It shows all the posts with that tag, just as if they're on a separate board!

For instance, if I wanted to honeymoon in Fiji, I could just look up the Fiji tag...

and get to see all the posts tagged about Fiji. http://boards.weddingbee.com/tags/fiji

(Okay, apparently Fiji isn't a very popular tag. If I were really looking to honeymoon there, this would be the perfect example of why tags should be used more, haha)

There's always more!

What are some of your favorite features of the site that are all too often overlooked?

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For more useful tips, tricks and information, please check out the WB Tips Tag!

@NJmeetsBX: We've actually talked about doing that. :) I think when the site was originally designed, it was put there because before the Submit button felt like a place you couldn't miss it. No matter the placement, it's an easy thing to overlook, especially if you get in the habit of skipping it!

@NJmeetsBX: It is, but it defaults to Beehive - so a lot of stuff ends up there :/

@NJmeetsBX: that's a thought - I'd have to ask the tech team about it :)