After our engagement of 2 years, 10 months, 25 days and executing two fantastic weddings, we have some thoughts and opinions and lessons learned we'd like to share.
Tradition
Weddings are full of baggage. By convention, it should be the most important, happy, beautiful event of your entire life. Every decision around throwing a weddings feels like a potential trap where not honoring some tradition will cause irredeemable outrage.
Some loose thoughts on this dynamic:
Nobody cares as much about your wedding as you do. There's a bare minimum level of "don't be a jerk" that, if met, means no decisions you make will cause lasting harm. Don't worry so much.
Other people's demands of your wedding are not worth your emotional energy, absent financial obligations.
A wedding is a snapshot in time that, at its best, represents where you are at as a couple and as a community. This can mean following or eschewing tradition, and often means both.
One of our mottos through our long, long process was "This is supposed to be fun." Obviously not everything is fun, but we found the motto was useful as a gut check when things were verging towards un-fun. Is it un-fun because it needs to be, or having you gotten trapped in nonsense?
Wedding Website
We used a combination of AppyCouple, Google Drive, and Trello to manage the project and host our wedding website. Keeping everything in sync across platforms increased the overall complexity in ways that left us needlessly frustrated.
In retrospect, we would have used either of these options:
Wix: where this website is hosted
Excellent website management, easy to publish, easy to make new pages and all that stuff.
Has a tasks management system, butwe haven't tried it. Wix would be worth it even it you didn't use this feature.
HubSpot: a Customer Management System that would work great as an all-in-one tool for weddings!
a great way to manage contacts (guests), including contact history and notes ("oh mom said that Aunt Suzie might be out of the country", and "mil said Uncle Freddy is gluten free")
group them by "company" (family)
a free website, shared inbox
automated emails (email invites with "call to action" links)
Also has tickets aka task management
The free version probably does everything you need it to.
Organizing / Checklist / Task Management
There are a million things to do, right? What are all the things? What is the timeline for them?
Your best friend here will be a project management tool, like Trello. Trello lets you create tasks (i.e. research cake bakers, schedule cake tastings, select & book cake baker, pay cake baker). You can also create columns that align with status (to-do, in-progress, on-hold, completed) or any other grouping you'd like. We made columns for when these tasks needed to be completed (i.e. 9-12 months, 6-8 months, 5 months, etc).
Second, now that you how you're going to organize the tasks, WHAT are the tasks? Sarah went to all the sites (Wedding Wire, The Knot, Zola, etc) and found their checklists. They often have a recommended due date (6 months in advance). Sarah then loaded them all into the Trello. Then Sarah & Mark reviewed the tasks and decided what they did and did not want.
Who does what? In Trello, you can assign each task to a person. Some things we both were involved in, but most tasks one person was the primary owner. Once tasks are assigned, you can filter the page to just see your tasks - this can help it be less overwhelming. Bonus: if your VIP (wedding party and immediate family) are helping out, see if they'll join Trello. This can help them get a sense of scope, what's left to do, what they think they can help with, etc.
Also, Trello allows you to take notes on the task, so you can have status updates or follow up notes, etc.
Trello was our best friend.
Planning Spreadsheet / Binder
Whether you prefer digital spreadsheet or physical binder, you'll want a place to record all the information. We are digital people and used the spreadsheet Planning Guide from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride).
Save the Dates & Invitations
We opted for physical Save the Dates and digital invitations. This was confusing for some but it ended up working out and we don't regret our choice. We used Minted Weddings for our Save the Dates are were happy with them and the end result. They proofed our drafted and we had a few back-and-forths with a designer. Overall it was a great experience.
Ideas & Inspiration
Sarah has been saving wedding ideas on Pintrest for years, so yeah, that was a big source of inspiration on what's out there.
We also really appreciated Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride) as a source. They do a few things really well:
blog posts from couples about how they ran their wedding, vendors they used, vows, etc - lots of inspiration focused on non-traditional weddings (nerdy/geeky, elopements / micro-weddings, interfaith, queer, etc)
vendor recommendations by state
book
aforementioned planning spreadsheet
Coodinator or Planner
When considering a coordinator, there are 2 options: full-service planner and day-of-coordinator. Sarah wanted to be elbow deep in the planning and is a control freak when it comes to organization. So, we knew that we didn't want a full-service planner. We also knew that we wanted ourselves and our closest friends and family to not be distracted with logistics on the day of the wedding, so we opted for a day-of-coordinator. This was the right call.
They offered us about 5 hours of call/zoom time to (1) help us plan / organize / answer questions, (2) make sure they understood everything that needed to be done/managed day of. They also responded to as many emails as we sent with questions. For example, we wanted shuttles to get folks from the ferry to the venue. When we got a quote from the shuttle company, we sent it to our coordinator and they promptly let us know that it was a reasonable price.
Good Luck!
We hope this helps and good luck on your wedding planning journey!
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