Thank you for offering up your facility as a place my beau and I might hold our wedding. It has come to my attention, however, that perhaps your website is not realizing its full potential. As someone who has perused, by my own estimation, approximately 5,394 venues online, please accept the following tips for improving your site’s content—thereby boosting visitor satisfaction, increasing ROI, whitening teeth, and making your mother proud.

1) Photos! Consider using them. They can be a surprisingly effective method of communicating information about your site to would-be clients.

2) Moreover, evaluate each photo’s inherent value. That is indeed quite a lovely shot of a cake on a table, but the only way this helps me learn about your business is if you happen to be a baker. Similarly, that delightful picture of the adorable flower girls does nothing to inform me about your property outside of the fact that you once hosted a wedding that included adorable flower girls. You know, experts recommend that you stage your house so that prospective buyers can imagine themselves living there, and the same idea holds true for wedding venues. I don’t want to flip through albums of strangers getting hitched. I want to see what the space looks like so that I can see how it fits with us.

3) Speaking of other people’s weddings, I couldn’t help but notice that in the photos you do have, the bride and groom appear to be sporting fashions dating back to 1987. I realize that the 80’s aesthetic is currently back with a fervent vengeance; still, the bride’s feathered hair and beaded bodice look less ironic than (alarmingly) authentic. Is 1987 the last time you actually held a wedding on the premises? If so, I’m worried. And you should be, too.

4) Please note that the second I read the words “heart topiary” or “wedding gazebo,” I will click the back button so hard your webmaster will cry.

5) Your webmaster probably deserves it, anyway.

6) Got your venue name and address on the website? Good. That’s a crucial step that many amateur proprietors often overlook. But how about—stay with me here—including even more information? Maybe you’re thinking, oh, nobody wants to waste time reading all that. On the contrary! I am dying to examine the details of your location in depth. Descriptions of on-site buildings and how many guests each will hold? Bring them on. A list of venue policies and procedures? Yes, please! Now, I understand that you may not want to list prices or full packages on your website, and that’s fine. But I’d like to have at least some vague sense of whether you’ll be able to accommodate my ultimate wedding dream—namely, arranging 5,000 lit candles in a meditative zen-like pattern around a historic fountain inside an art museum whilst a scrappy yet enthusiastic team of midgets ride in on donkeys and present each guest with a bottle of absinthe as the speakers blast Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” after 10:00pm—before I bother contacting your coordinator to find out how many thousands of dollars you’ll want to suck from my bank account. Got that? I just want to know. Please.

Thank you for your time.