The bride, the groom and the minister.  A  wedding is a significant event in anyone's life.  I am always amazed by the folks who shop for the cheapest minister rather than the best.  They call and instead of trying to learn about the services and ministers their only question is "What is the price? "

It reminds me of the joke about the astronaut climbing aboard the rocket about to take him into space who said, " I understand that I face incredible odds and many unforeseen dangers as I climb into this rocket, knowing full well that every nut, screen, O- ring, seal and gasket was selected because it had the cheapest price."

Considering that the cost of the officiate or minister is one of the cheapest elements of the wedding, it is my belief that selecting your minister by price alone,  is an unwise way of thinking.  I'll admit I am not the cheapest officiate in town so maybe I'm prejudiced.  For the record....I'm not the most expensive either.

If you are looking for a wedding minister my advice to you is remember the headline on this blog.

At your wedding all eyes are on three people. Your choice of minister is more important than an upgrade in the reception costs for seat covers, or whether the buffet choice is roast beef over chicken.

Because a year after your wedding no one will remember whether they ate roast beef or chicken or whether they seats had covers or not.

But if the minister doesn't provide a ceremony that is Beautiful....Meaningful....and Memorable it probably won't be remembered at all or perhaps will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.  And we guarantee it isn't a Remembrance Wedding, or one done by one of our associate companies.....WedXpress and EZ-Wed Elopement Services.

Because of our mission and our money back guarantee is that we will provide you a "Romantic Personal Wedding Ceremony You'll Remember Forever....Beautiful....Meaningful....Memorable.

But if cheap is what you seek, go on line and get a friend ordained by the Church of What's Happening Now, or some other outfit that will make you a minister (of sorts) for free. I'm sure your friend can come up with just the right words, rituals et al to make a perfect wedding.

In some states there are suits that have been filed that contend that weddings performed by such ministers are not valid.  I doubt that the courts will side with that point of view...separation of church and state.  The lawyer fees to prove it one way or another won't be a lot of money I'm sure.  Just be sure to look for a lawyer with "cheap" in the ad.    

  Once upon a time I wrote the copy for my Remembrance Weddings website and I really tried to put as much information as I could that would be helpful, not just in picking an officiate but also in planning the wedding ceremony for couples.

Being a writer (my first college degree was a Bachelor of Journalism Science from Ohio University, one of the nation's finest journalism schools) I felt like I had accomplished that, and judging from comments I received from brides, they thought it was helpful.

Now we are in the age of search engine optimization.  People hunt for wedding ministers on search engines. If you don't show up on the first page of the search results you never get any calls. The search engines have rules about what you can do and say on your site. If you violate those rules they bury you on page 1439 of the results, a fate worse than death if you are trying to keep a business going.

So you study the rules and do your best. I took a college course in Search Engine Optimization and did well in the class only to find out that all the rules were changed two months later.

It's frustrating because sometimes the rules make no sense.  Do you know that you can't use the word "wedding" too many times on a wedding officiate web site cause the robots may thing that you are trying to scam them and you get penalized.  They don't tell you, you just get put in the back of the line and you realize your phone hasn't rung with prospects for months.

Oh, you can hire companies that cost big bucks to do it for you.  And they can help sometimes. I had a big outfit for a while (two years) but then I got penalized because a lot of bad sites (porn mostly) attached links to my site without me knowing or seeing them. Many were buried.  I disappeared from searches for a while.

I've been feeling for a while now that the search engines do all this because they want to force you to pay to be on the first page of the search. It seems to be working, as I see more and more of my competitors paying the be there.

I've hired a new person who started working with me on the site.  I did it because I was spending all my time trying to figure out the rules and making changes to the site, instead of other things I need to do. She's made the site prettier and the navigation is easier.  And she has put up with my ranting.. Thanks Carolyn. The new site has been up for a week now. Yesterday we were going through it and 10 porn sites, mostly Russian, had attached links.

Now she is going through the site and besides removing the porn links, she is shortening the copy and making it more robot friendly. That's something they didn't teach me in the School of Journalism at Ohio University.

Can you tell I'm frustrated?