Getting Started on Wedding Planning

When I told you that I got married, I said I’d write a little bit about planning a wedding, some DIY projects, et cetera. I’ve been a little busy posting pumpkin recipes, but I thought it was about time to get into wedding stuff. Maybe it’s Wedding Wednesday. Ha. Anyways, I thought I’d get started with, well, where to get started.

The first thing I did was to register with Wedding Wire and create a wedding budget. Well actually, that’s a lie. The first thing I did was buy these purple polka dot paper straws. LOVE them.

A lot of people wonder which wedding website to go with. I highly recommend Wedding Wire. And they’re not even paying me to say this. I thought it was very user-friendly, easy to navigate, and it had everything I needed in one spot. Compared to The Knot, much better. In terms of site design, Wedding Wire is much cleaner and nicer-looking. The Knot is covered in so much random stuff, you can’t figure out where you want to click. WW also offers personal websites, which I set up immediately.

So what was Wedding Wire good for?

Personal website

Ours included some pictures of us, our story, our bios, information about the ceremony and reception, links to our registries, a link to RSVP to the wedding, a form to request music, a place for people to send us ‘guest book’ messages, and a ‘contact us’ form. It was really great to be able to refer people to one place for everything.

We also saved money on invitations by having online RSVPs — we didn’t have to buy RSVP cards or return envelopes or postage for said envelopes. (Along the bottom of the invitation, we added the line, “Please RSVP to http://www.weddingwire.com/…and….” This also solved the problem of giving people access to the registry without being tacky and writing it on the invitation.

Bonus: There are a million design template to choose from, including the one we used, a Vera Wang design.

Homepage of our wedding website

Budget

One of the most important tools is budgeting! I tracked everything because I wanted to make sure we stayed within a reasonable budget. The categories are helpful to get you to think about what’s important to you and what you’re willing to spend. Then as you’re planning, enter in your purchases. It will even let you say who paid for it, so if your parents are helping you out, you can indicate if they paid that bill or if you did. Excellent for tracking. Anything I bought online went automatically in, and any receipt from a store went into my wallet to be entered later.

Checklist

The checklist tool kept me all together. It came automatically filled in with tasks to do, arranged by month. So I had a great sense of when I needed to get my dress by, when I needed to send invitations, and all that. The checklist also allows you to personalize it by deleting or adding anything. You can also assign tasks to other people — super helpful if you’re having an argument with your fiance about who was supposed to call his mother to talk about the rehearsal dinner. (And for the record, he was.)

The checklist is also handy in that it increases motivation. If you miss a deadline, a little orange exclamation point will appear next to that task so that you know it is VERY IMPORTANT. When I logged on one day 2 months before my wedding and saw 27 exclamations, I knew it was time to step it up a notch. Which I did the next day, after I spent that day totally losing it.

My checklist always has overdue tasks. Le sigh.

RSVPs

I highly recommend online RSVPs, but even if you do paper RSVPs, WW will keep them all organized for you. I uploaded our guest list from an Excel with the click of a button, and then everyone was stored with their addresses. I was able to say who was coming to which event. The ceremony, reception, and rehearsal dinner are already listed, but you can add anything — for example, bridal shower, bachelorette party, or engagement party. I ignored the ‘ceremony’ option, but I definitely used the rehearsal option and the rehearsal dinner. It was very simple to make sure everyone had been invited, to track RSVPs, and to get a final headcount for the caterers.

Other Things

Presumably Wedding Wire does many other things as well; I just didn’t really use any other functions. These were the most practical and helpful. There are areas of the site that allow you to interact with other users, read and write reviews of vendors, and more. They also have a mobile app for on-the-go planning. If I didn’t have such a crappy phone, that might have been useful. It seemed cool.

Alrighty, next time: more on budgeting. For any weirdos out there interested in personal information like how much money I spent on my wedding, you won’t want to miss it.