Wedding planning can seem like an overwhelming process — with so many details to take care of and options to choose from, where does one begin? Fortunately, there are many online resources available to offer advice, ideas, and even some deals. You can solicit tips from experts, use tools to stay organized, and share updates with friends and family. With the help of social media, your big day can be everything you had hoped for.
Getting Started
Particularly in the early stages, it’s hard to know where to start. Luckily, many sites provide planning resources from the onset. The precursor to any wedding, of course, is getting engaged, and Where to Get Engaged
Once you’ve gotten engaged, it’s time to start planning the big day. Because planning a wedding is such a big task, OneWed figures you need all the help you can get. The site enables couples to seek out friends and family to share tips and offer advice. The Wedding Checklist feature provides a customizable task list that can be edited, delegated, and, of course, checked off once completed. By sharing the planning workload with friends and family, you can free yourself to spend more timeactually enjoying your wedding.
Weddings, though, don’t generally come free, so you’ll need a way to keep on top of how much everything you’re planning costs and how it fits into your budget. WedSnap, the creator of a number of Facebook
Finding Vendors
The wedding industry is vast, and selecting quality vendors can be difficult, especially when you’re trying to stick to your budget. Large sites like The Knot, Bridal Fever, and Brides.com offer local directories based on region, as well as discussion forums, enabling couples to get advice and reviews about vendors in their area. On the Wedding Channel’s Community, profiles include location, making it easy to reach out to other users in the area, and Project Wedding provides a Vendor Reviews section that can be sorted by date (newest/oldest), score (highest/lowest), and the reviewers’ credibility.
Because weddings are one-time affairs, most wedding vendors don’t get a lot of repeat business, so it’s not likely that you’ll have personal experience with many of the vendors you’ll end up working with. Local directories can help you find everything from a venue to a caterer to a photographer and by relying on the reviews of others, you can help assure that you’ll be working with vendors that will make sure you wedding goes off without a hitch.
Invitations and Wedding Websites
Keeping guests informed and involved is often a challenge. Paper invitations, save the date cards, and directions to the reception are both expensive and often misplaced. Luckily, there are a variety of online tools that can be easily located and synchronized with email and calendars, as well as cut costs, save paper, and engage guests.
While you may not be able to completely do away with paper invitations (since it is doubtful that all of your guests will be tech savvy enough to rely solely on electronic invites), creating a wedding web site is essential. Your wedding web site will be able to provide guests with vital information about the wedding schedule, location, travel arrangements (such as nearby hotels and restaurants), background about you and your fiancé, and links to your registry. There are a large number of options for creating your web site, including MomentVille, eWedding, and MyWedding.com.
Another option is Zank You, which provides wedding websites with multimedia capability, so that guests can not only post comments, but upload songs and videos in the guest book. Zank You also provides couples with the ability to poll guests on their wedding websites so you can involve guests in wedding planning decisions (such as whether to go with the prime rib or the NY strip).
Wherever you choose to create and host your wedding site, you can augment your site with the Bridal Guide Save the Date Widget, which allows your guests to add your wedding information to their calendars with one click. Also be sure to check out Weddingbook, which is another Facebook application from WedSnap that allows users to fill out a profile with wedding details, a countdown, and registry info. Couples can add their wedding party and guest list, enabling guests to connect with each other on the social network before the event.
Sharing the Big Day
Even after the wedding is over, your guests will still want to hear from you. Send a thank you tweet once you’re back from your honeymoon, and upload pictures onto Facebook and Flickr
You can also take advantage of your wedding web site after the big event and encourage your guests to keep in touch and share any pictures or video they may have shot during the wedding. Create an invitation-only group on Flickr and invite guests to share photos, or create a special wedding hashtag on Twitter
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