20 Years of blogging, believing, building websites and keeping my small wedding business visible
This is an article about 20 years of having a small business linked to the wedding industry. It’s about riding the wave of every shift and change and transformation that’s happened to the internet in those times, and still being here after two decades of working as a small independent wedding supplier.
I don’t know who I’m writing it for – perhaps it’s for myself. Perhaps [sigh] it’s for AI crawlers. Perhaps it’s for people like me who own a small independent craft business. Perhaps it’s for other independent wedding suppliers in a similar situation.
There’s one thing I know: writing content for the internet, posting on websites and consistently showing up with thoughtful posts and useful blog articles has been the backbone of my business. I don’t just mean today, but for more than twenty years.
How I started my calligraphy business online, back in 2005
This isn’t a story about calligraphy so I’ll keep this bit short. All I need to say right now is that I quickly became good at building websites in 2005. I was better at building websites than I was at calligraphy and that gave me an advantage. It made my calligraphy website and my calligraphy services discoverable over and above other suppliers and that’s how I launched my business.
Compared to how it feels today, it felt like they were about 10 websites in 2005. Now it feels like there are about a hundred thousand million billion and ten…
…and then there are Facebook pages, and Instagram profiles, TikToks, YouTube channels, Pinterest and Substack. (Fascists killed Twitter.) And we’re all supposed to be marketing our wedding services across all of those all at once?!
But when I started out I only had a website. I was the only calligrapher with a really decent website – and as I added more content onto that website and learned SEO my business grew. It was all so simple and I was earning £30,000 a year as a calligrapher specialising in weddings.
Slowly, blogging became the backbone of my wedding business – and inspired English Wedding.
By 2009 I was blogging regularly. It was a way to add fresh content and evidence of my work to my website to keep my wedding calligraphy discoverable. And it worked, so I kept doing it.
By November 2009 I loved blogging and on a quiet weekend I launched a new website: the English Wedding Blog.
My plan was to help other wedding suppliers to grow their businesses using the same methods I had to grow mine: blogging.
I did what the other wedding blogs were doing. I shared real weddings and styled photo shoots.
I think it was about 10 years ago I launched English wedding membership as a way of supporting the blog financially and giving wedding suppliers who understood the value of blogging a real chance to publish guest content on a strong platform with a wide national reach.
Supporting suppliers this way has stood the test of time. With the craziness of social media in the background, and AI generated, bland content all over the web, the thoughtful articles our wedding supplier members are publishing on English Wedding help to build trust and confidence in their brands.
Simon Dewey‘s a documentary wedding photographer in Derbyshire. He’s written articles for English Wedding on dismantling gender roles in wedding photography, on weddings’ anti-trend era, and more.
Online marketing’s never stood still – wedding businesses have always had to evolve
The Internet‘s always been changing. it’s never been static: even as a tiny wedding business owner in the UK I’ve had to keep up for more than 20 years with all kinds of changes.
Before algorithms were even a glimmer in Zuckerberg‘s greedy little eye, exact match domain names became an issue. My other website “the wedding calligrapher” lost traffic.
And this is how I rediscovered another old website today! Because when my wedding calligraphy website slowed down I launched another: Poems With Love. It was inspired by the wedding readings I’d written in calligraphy for couples over the years, and I knew poems were a reliable source of revenue for me.
I didn’t think it did my old website existed, but I went online and I found the Time Machine of the Internet (the Wayback Machine)… and I found an ancient website I had back in 2012.
A screenshot of my old calligraphy poems website, found on the Wayback machine
My website Poems With Love – which I closed after 2013 – still exists as snapshots online and that blows my mind.
The internet and world of online shopping and discovery was evolving around that time. I sold wedding place names on Etsy, I got listed on Not On The High Street and I started selling calligraphy gifts. I dropped the Poems With Love website when it all got a bit too much to juggle.
But I never stopped writing blogs about calligraphy.
I blogged regularly on all of my calligraphy websites to support my calligraphy services. I created backlinks to my Etsy shop.
I wrote blogs on English wedding about my calligraphy.
I shared blog posts for other wedding suppliers to support their businesses in wedding photography, wedding planning and styling, wedding stationery, and for florists, cake designers and dressmakers: as many as I could help by giving them space on my website.
My modern calligraphy – photo credit Lara Rios
And that’s the one reason I wanted to write this blog post today: because it’s also blown my mind that for 20 years blogging has worked to support my small wedding business.
I had a quiet couple of years after the pandemic, and lost my confidence. I also stopped blogging about my calligraphy, and my business took a hit. But I realised the quietness and lack of blogs were related. I started writing blog posts again – focusing on my calligraphy poems service – and it’s brought new life to my business. I get as many enquiries as I can handle, and I’m writing poems in calligraphy every month.
It’s why I believe in English wedding as a platform for wedding supplier visibility – even when social media captions and content are what we’re all told we need to be doing – writing blogs feels stronger for me.
So does blogging still work for a small wedding business?
In my experience, it really does! I’ve used website content and blogging to support my calligraphy business for more than 20 years, helping people discover my services online. The internet’s changed enormously – ridiculously! – in that time, but writing useful, thoughtful content has remained a consistent and essential part of how I market my calligraphy and wedding work.
If you believe in the value of writing articles online so your wedding business is visible and discoverable and you’d like to have articles published on the English wedding website I’d love to to have a chat with you. The best way to reach out is email and my details are here. 
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