About
Explore, Dream and Plan the Perfect Intimate Wedding
Small Weddings SM is committed to ensuring couples easily find wedding venues for smaller, relaxed, meaningful, practical and personal weddings.
What is a Small Wedding?
We define it as 50 or less guests.
Our Story
While helping to facilitate over four thousand weddings in the last 30 years, Blane Ellsworth noticed couples decreasing the size of their weddings. Blane created Small Weddings SM to assist couples in finding smaller wedding venues that are perfect for a more relaxed and personal wedding day.
Our Team
Small Weddings is the creation of experts in the wedding industry and Internet marketing.
Blane Ellsworth, Founder and President
Blane Ellsworth’s well established reputation in the wedding industry has enabled him to be on the forefront of wedding trends. From officiating his first wedding nearly thirty years ago, Blane Ellsworth has played an integral role in developing Napa Valley as a world recognized wedding venue.
After developing NapaValleyWeddings.com, Blane launched EnchantingElopements.com, one of the first websites exclusively for elopements.
With his keen visionary perspective, Blane is currently fostering the development of Small Weddings SM
While helping to facilitate over four thousand weddings, Blane has noticed couples decreasing the size of their weddings. Ensuring couples can easily find venues for smaller, relaxed, meaningful, practical and personal weddings, Blane provides our Small Weddings SM team inspiration towards this ideal.
Cherie Collins, Director of E-Business
Cherie Collins is an Internet entrepreneur who started her first Internet business in 1996. Web Vacations.net, a directory of vacation rentals, represented more than 50,000 rentals at the time of its 1998 merger with www.BetterWorldClub.com. In 2000, Cherie joined the team of WebAccommodate where she built an online electronic distribution service for vacation rentals. In 2003, Cherie was asked to join the team at Yellow Pages Travel (a subsidiary of YellowPages.com). Within a year, Yellow Pages Travel sold to SBC-Bell South for $13 Million.
In 2005, Cherie partnered with the team from Yellow Pages Travel to build the popular vacation rental listing service www.AlwaysOnVacation.com, which now has more than 100,000 listings. Cherie has helped build websites for more than 1000 small business owners in the past 15 years. She is dedicated to creating best standards in the web design industry and empowering small business owners with beautiful professional websites that grow with their businesses. Cherie has a BA in Communication from Santa Clara University.
Jeff Bailey – Lead Engineer
Jeff has more than 15 years leading engineering teams. He is a rare type of developer who is both a highly creative graphic designer and analytical database architect and programmer. In 2002, he won the Nevada Governor's Award in design for museum displays designed while working as the lead advertising designer at Lexicon Visual Marketing.
He has extensive knowledge and use of Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign on both Windows and Macintosh OS. He is an expert in all phases of design, from marketing research, to final output for press and web. He is experienced in website design and maintenance with Dreamweaver CS3, hand-coded XHTML, and Javascript. He also has expertise in interactive dynamic website design and development using PHP, ASP and MySQL databases, as well as search engine optimization web techniques.
Tami Ward, Director of Digital Marketing
Tami is a strategic marketing professional with over 21 years of experience driving exceptional return on investment through interactive direct marketing campaigns. She has developed and managed thousands of targeted direct marketing campaigns for both B to B and B to C clients. She has the focused ability to develop motivational social media campaigns that encourage interaction and brand loyalty. She holds a “Digital Marketing Strategist” Certification from Portland State University. Tami has a BA in Marketing Communications from Columbia College, Chicago, Il.
Rupert Edson, Creative Director
In 1998, Rupert co-founded Spark Design, LLC where he focused on brand management for benefits and HR communications. Spark Design quickly became the exclusive Designer for Benecom, working on high-end projects that included American Express, Coca Cola, and 5-Star Las Vegas Casinos. Rupert skillfully integrated brand development with existing corporate branding to maintain continuity, producing materials in multiple languages. In addition to designing Benefits Packages, Rupert enjoyed creating and developing logos, catalogs, posters, packaging and website solutions for a diverse clientele.