Top Tips

Create a Wedding Website

One of the most exciting steps in planning your wedding is building your own wedding website. This online space will play several roles at the same time: the site will communicate all the details to your guests, it will allow you to gather all the information that you need from them and it will celebrate your love and commitment to one another with your friends and relatives.

• All the important info clearly stated: date, location, schedule, dress code.
• RSVP form — guests can quickly and easily let you know where they stand.
• Contact information for questions.
• Interactive map to the venue.
• A couple of gorgeous photos of the happy couple.
• Optional: a section sharing your love story, a photo album, and local hotel or restaurant recommendations for out-of-town guests.

Research Every Step

A large variety of online resources are available at your fingertips. Use them! With wedding blogs, vendor reviews, Pinterest albums and many other options, you have the ability to perform thorough research at every step of the way: from choosing your wedding photographer to deciding on the color scheme. For inspirational reading, start with going through wedding blogs and real-wedding stories. Discuss all things wedding on forums where you can learn from the experience of other couples.

Create a Joint Email Account

Rather than communicating with guests through your account, your partner's account, their mother's account, etc., why not create a special email account for the big day? It will be far easier for your guests and for yourself to have one centralized address for all wedding-related correspondences. Not to mention, it's a cute addition to the wedding hype when all communications are run from a symbolic address, such as "ben.kerin.2019@gmail" or "TheJonesWed@yahoo". You can set up automatic forwarding to the personal email addresses of all organizers, and create a filter within your personal inbox to display only the emails related to your wedding account.

Send Beautiful Email Updates

Keep your guests excited and engaged by sending email updates as the date of your wedding approaches. You can organize your contacts into groups to have separate emails for the full guest list, the dress rehearsal party or the bridesmaids. Strategize your emails with moderation and pay attention to timing. Three or four emails sent to the full guest list is quite enough. Start with a "Save the Date" announcement, followed by a full invitation with all the details and a link to your wedding website. At a later point, send out a reminder to RSVP, a request for guests to add their favorite dance floor hits to your playlist, or weather forecast updates.

Control Your Budget

Every person who has ever tied the knot will tell you that budgeting is one of the most challenging parts about the whole process. Let's face it, weddings are expensive. There are hidden and unexpected costs at every turn of the way, and it's not easy to get a consensus about budget priorities for an event of this nature. The best way to tackle this issue is to come prepared and organized. Fortunately, you can rely on a variety of digital tools to help you manage, update and keep track of your budget. Use mobile apps to track your expenses and keep track of the big picture.

Manage Your Wedding Like a Team Project

Some wedding productions require the meticulousness and precision of military operations. Even if yours is not expected to be as elaborate as those, you will still find yourself juggling multiple tasks, deadlines and choices. Since it takes at least two people to get married, planning the event often becomes a group project. Use project management tools like Trello or Asana to assign tasks, keep track of the timeline, add notes and get notifications. With a helpful system to centralize all to-do items, you will not lose track of who is in charge of ordering flowers, who is responsible for testing the sound system and who prepares the welcome signs.

Prepare for Online Gifts

We are gathered here today because of the two individuals who are in love, but let's not forget about the gifts! Wedding gifts are one aspect of the event that has received an amazing boost thanks to the Internet. You can now build your wedding registries at your favorite eCommerce stores, and all that is required of your guests is to make the purchase online. Of course, if you decide that instead of a gift registry you prefer cash gifts, you can set up a PayPal or Venmo account. Whichever you choose — cash or registry — be sure to add links and clear, friendly instructions to your wedding website. And don't forget to thank them for their gifts!

Curate the Ultimate Playlist

So much of the wedding fun happens on the dance floor, and one great perk of organizing the wedding is getting into the groove by preparing your music playlist for the event. If you are hiring a DJ to play at your event, preparing your own playlist is useful in helping them understand your musical preferences and agreeing on songs that you absolutely must have. You can create several playlists, each with the right style for the different stages of your wedding, from the cocktail reception, through dinner time and to the dancing. You don't want your event depending on the quality of wifi in the venue, so best make your playlist available offline.

Draft the Seating Arrangement

Taking care of the seating arrangement is not known to bring joy to wedding planners. While we can't help you with questions like how to seat feuding uncles as far from each other as possible, we are able to suggest a few digital tools that can make seating arrangement easier to handle. Start by organizing your guests and tables in a spreadsheet. Then, you can work with platforms to create a seating chart, adjusting its layout according to the venue's seating arrangement. If you are artistically inclined, you may want to try sketching the seating arrangement on your own using your tablet.

Create a Collective Wedding Album

Gone are the days when wedding memories were captured solely by the professional photographer on the ground. Every guest can now participate in your wedding album using their smartphones. And since they will take photos anyway, why not share them with the whole party? One way to invite guests to share their own photos of your wedding is by setting up an Instagram hashtag and having everyone post their pics together with the hashtag. Another option is to ask your guests to upload their images directly to your wedding website. If you want to display the images during the wedding itself, you can use a service that creates a feed collecting all tagged images into one amazing slideshow. Once you receive your professional pictures you can show them off using a gallery on your site.