 pingg.com Planning a destination wedding can be very tedious, and one of the most important things is to keep your guests informed. There is A LOT to inform them about, however, and new things seem to pop up over and over again. I don’t think it is possible to include everything in your invitation and I also don’t think you can count on all of your guests checking your wedding website all of the time to stay on top of your breaking wedding news.
The best thing to do is send occasional emails to all of your guests with news and updates – it also gets everyone excited about their own vacation!
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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).
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 from http://flickr.com/photos/ifindkarma/92240723/ Though in real life I can be a bit disorganized (friends and relatives are currently snickering, I’m sure), there are certain things that I am absolutely anal about. Wedding planning is one of them. In order to make sense of the mountain of links, photos and documents that you’ll surely accumulate during your engagement, I’ve rounded up some handy sites.
Delicious
This site is not just a seamless way to aggregate all of those handy links to vendors, venues and other planning websites. It’s also a social bookmarking site, which means you can browse the millions of bookmarks that others have saved. Basically, instead of using your bookmark feature in Firefox or Internet Explorer, you use Delicious’s tool to save links and add tags– like the ones here on BridalBuds — to put them into categories. You can also search by keywords to find useful links. I did one for florida keys wedding and up popped 33 links that other brides had saved. Very handy!
Photobucket
No matter what computer you’re using– the work machine, your fiancé’s laptop or your old clunker– all of those beautiful wedding inspiration photos will be easily accessible. Of course any online photo manager– like Flickr — will serve the same purpose. The tagging function is very useful, plus you can organize photos into albums/sets for more flexibility.
Google Docs
This is a very powerful way to manage the assorted spreadsheets, word processing documents and even presentations associated with your wedding. You can make them private or, better yet, share them with your other half so he has no excuse not to update his best man’s address on the invite list. Other ideas include time lines, vendor contact sheets and response lists.
Google Reader
Last but not least is my beloved Google Reader. For the uninitiated, it’s an aggregator for RSS feeds, which help you subscribe to your favorite blogs, news sites and more. That way you don’t have to keep revisiting sites to see if they’ve updated– Google Reader will collect all of the new content for you. It’s also a good way to organize the blogs and sites you regularly read, since you can create your own categories and make notes on individual entries as well.
I hope these sites will help you as much as they’ve helped me! What online tools have been invaluable to your wedding planning?
One of the first questions we asked ourselves when we got engaged was how much we are going to spend for the wedding. I thought setting up a budget was quick and easy. It actually turned out to be a long process that requires a lot of research for both of us who knew so little about weddings.
 Photo from Ashleysbrideguide.com There are many elements in a wedding. Setting up a budget not only requires coming up with a single number, but several numbers for each element. How much of your total budget will go to food and beverage, flowers and decor, photography, entertainment, etc?
There are lot of wedding budget tools on and offline that can help. But there’s one important feature missing on most of these budget tools. They don’t factor in your priorities. I learned that setting your priorities is very important in coming up with a budget breakdown. While most tools recommend allotting around 30% to 50% of the total budget to reception, our reception (including venue fee) turned out to be almost 75% of our total budget. Crazy, isn’t it? Well, to us, good food and a beautiful venue that requires minimal decor (one way to save) top our priority list.
Here is a copy of my Budget Breakdown, and these are the steps I followed to create it:
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Tropical dreaming by Plumeria Bud
Inspiration boards were something I never really thought about until I became a bride. Sure, I had seen photos of them before– I’m thinking of fashion designers that have actual bulletin boards full of chic photos and notions that guide their collections. But until I started frequenting sites like Style Me Pretty and Snippet and Ink I didn’t see why I would ever need one.
Now I am a huge fan and have to stop myself from making a board for every little thing. There are many methods for making inspiration boards. I’ve found Polyvore to be the easiest for me– no need to buy expensive software and their “clipping” tool makes it super easy to grab images from all over the web. Polyvore is also a great site for general inspiration– type in some keywords like “beach wedding” and dozens of sets pop up.
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I am a technology junkie. I admit it. Maybe it has something to do with my profession, maybe it has everything to do with my generation, but I am seriously addicted to anything and everything that keeps me connected to anything and everything else. I’m a facebook-oholic, I crumble without my phone, and I chronically g-chat at work. That said, the more rational side of me says “Pansy Bud, there are times when the internet will not always be available to you. Likely, when you need it most.”
I keep nearly all of my wedding files on my laptop. When I came across Real Simple’s wedding lists I had a gut feeling they were a diamond in the rough.
I have assembled and distributed a few copies of their “Vendor Contact List” to a number of key people, my mum, the day-of-coordinator at the club, my MOH. When my Crackberry has died, my laptop has overheated, and the nearest Starbucks with Wi-Fi is 30 miles away, I’ll thankful that I took the time to write down the names and numbers of key contacts.
In addition to the “Vendor Contact List” they have any number of other helpful lists- things you might ask your officiant, your baker, or your dress-maker.
As a professional project manager, I really wasn’t too worried or stressed about wedding planning. However, after listening to stories of others going through the process, I was getting a little worried that maybe I was missing something and that is why I was so calm. I have always been extremely organized and usually would have a good idea of everything that I need to get done, but of course, I really didn’t know all the small details involved in putting together the perfect wedding.
After much googling and visiting every site possible out there, I came upon WeddingWire.com which has a wealth of wedding tools including one of the cutest and most complete checklists I’ve ever seen!!!!!! It had things in it that I never would have thought of and everytime I check a task off, my little bride would move closer to my groom in the graphics. As simple as it may sound, trust me, it’s a motivator to get tasks done just to see that little girl go. So… I’ve officially hit the under 1 year mark and I’m well on schedule according to the checklist.
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