Being that half of our wedding guests are in Italy and the other half are all of the U.S., I knew I needed to create some sort of a communal forum to post information in both Italian and English for travel plans, registry, accommodations, wedding weekend schedule, etc. Creating a wedding website was the perfect solution!

weddingwire.com

Luckily, I found WeddingWire – a bride’s dream come true. It gave me the ability to create our wedding website, create a guest list (complete with addresses and a seating chart), search for ideas, and search for wedding vendors (only downfall – they don’t have any vendors in Italy).

I created our website right after our engagement and sent out an email notification to our friends and family. It was the perfect place to announce our engagement and tell the story (I didn’t have the energy to call every single person to go through the romantic story in detail). When I was ready to send out our save the dates to all of our invited guests, I edited the content to include more details such as the location in Italy, date, guest book, and our contact information for questions.

Finally, when our invitations were going out, I added our registry (both American and Italian), a wedding weekend schedule, travel agent contact information, contact information for accommodations in Artimino (our wedding location), and some fun extras – spa information in Artimino, etc.

It seems to have worked perfectly to help carry a lot of the load that a bride tends to hold on her shoulders. Rather than deal with all of the phone calls, emails, and repetitive questions, I simply post our website address on everything.

The important things to remember are: 1) keep the content clean and easy to read 2) think about what your guests might need and want to know – the more small details you cover the better 3) if you’re getting married in another country that speaks a different language than English, try to cater to both – we wrote in a mix of English and Italian and included an American registry and an Italian registry.

Thank goodness for technology…honestly, how did brides do this before???