A wedding Web site from Seattle's Nearlyweds

Nearlyweds is tying the knot with OneWed, creating a powerful one-stop online destination for couples who are planning to get married. The combined company, which will be based in Seattle and called Nearlyweds, boasts more than 100,000 wedding Web sites created (both free and paid) in the past 18 months. In addition to the acquisition, Nearlyweds also is announcing a $500,000 financing round from angel investors such as Founder's Co-op's Andy Sack and Chris DeVore and BuddyTV co-founders Andy Liu and David Niu.

All of the employees at OneWed, including CEO Jennifer Napier, are expected to stay with the combined company. Nearlyweds CEO John Scrofano said that the match makes a lot of sense since it brings together two complementary groups of employees.

"The Nearlyweds' team builds excellent software with exceptional conversion rates. We were not awesome at building a large audience," said Scrofano. "OneWed is great at building a large audience. Time to leverage the strengths of both."

One thing that OneWed brings to the party is a nationwide directory of 235,000 local wedding vendors and a traffic base of between 200,000 and 500,000 unique visitors per month (based on seasonality). Nearlyweds plans to leverage that audience and vendor base with its easy-to-use wedding Web site tools.

"I will beat this drum a lot, but we want to make wedding planning dramatically simpler. The process is overwhelming and big media just feeds the mania," said Scrofano. "The marriage is lost in the event planning. We are here to change that."

Nearlyweds faces competition from a number of players, including TheKnot and Bainbridge Island's MyWedding.com.