How To Use Technology to Plan Your Wedding
Planning a wedding can be a difficult and very time consuming task. But alas, like everything else these days, we can look to technology to help make wedding planning easier on us. Below are many ways in which we can make use of technology to help make planning the big day a little less stressful. It might also be a great way to help you save a little money too.
Create a Wedding Website
Having your own wedding website to inform your guests about things for your wedding is a great idea. It can save the time needed to answer a lot of phone calls and have conversations about hotels near the reception, directions on how to get the wedding ceremony and where you are registered. Having your own wedding website should not replace sending out wedding invitations, but it can mean having a lot less inserts, also keeping your wedding costs down by not requiring as many stamps.
If you are really tech savvy, you can have your guests RSVP on your website too! Then you do not have to deal with phone calls and mail. This can also save you some money because you do not need to send everyone a stamped RSVP postcard or envelope.
Wedding Blog
A lot of couples these days are keeping a wedding blog to help friends and family keep up to date on how all of your planning is going. This can also be a fun way to catch up with out of town guests and get comments and feedback on some of your ideas. A blog is also a great way to share pictures and stories from the bachelor parties and/or wedding shower.
Online Research
Using the internet to research for wedding information is probably a given in this day and age, but no technology wedding planning advice could go without mentioning it. There are plenty of great resources out there, in addition to EverythingAboutWeddings.net. Manolo Brides is a great blog that up to date on all the great new wedding trends. There is also a great etiquette site called Always a Bridesmaid that can a wealth of information.
In addition to just reading up on great tips, thoughts and ideas, another great resource is Q&A sites such as Yahoo! Answers. It is a fabulous way for asking about experiences of others as well as planning tips and unique ideas to help make your wedding day extra special.
Wedding Invitations
A great money and time saver option is to use an online invitation and party planning tool such as eVite. This can save you bundles of time as you will not need to collect everyone address (although you will still need their email address), writing out their names on the cards and envelopes or print them all up. Depending on the quality of the online application that you go with, there may not be an online RSVP that allows you to select your meal preference, but it will work great for buffet style weddings.
You can also build your own custom RSVP system as part of your website that will allow your guests to RSVP. An advantage of this is that you can customize it so you can track things like guests' food allergies as well as collect song requests for the reception dance.
Wedding Music
Instead of hiring a potentially lame wedding band or DJ, consider making use of your iPod. If you already know all the songs you want to hear at your wedding (because you took song requests as part of your RSVP system or simply because you have a good idea of what music you would like to play) you can create song play lists on your iPod for the reception dance. My advice is to have a lot more songs than you intend to play though in case some songs are duds and you need to move along quickly. The downside of this is that you will need someone to keep an eye on the dance floor and switch up the tunes if there is nobody dancing. Make sure your iPod is fully charged too (and keep your charger handy just in case).
Online Wedding Registries
You can create wedding registries online and save the hassles of going into the store and get the sales pitch about how this is the time to request just about everything you will ever need. This way you can select items you wish for in the comfort of your own home. You can also track your registry online at many retailers, so be sure to look into that when selecting who to set up your wedding/bridal registry with. If you know that you have guests in different countries see if the retailer accepts orders from outside the country and how they handle shipment, transactions etc. just so you can get an idea of how easy/hard it will be for your guests to use these services. People love convenience and often it saves a lot of time and effort for your guests if they can order things online and have it delivered right to the groom and bride (and with the bonus of not have to worry about traveling with the gift).
