Once you’re engaged, creating a personalized wedding website is a great way to communicate wedding information to guests quickly and efficiently. You get to have fun and upload photos, tell your engagement story, talk about your bridesmaids, create an online guestbook and much more. There are many useful sources available to build your site on:

TheKnot.com

MyWedding.com

WedOrama.com

My newly engaged sister just created one for her June 2010 wedding. Check it out here! Be practical – once you have the information gathered, add hotel contact numbers, travel directions, wedding attire, the weekend’s events, and local attractions. Have fun with it! It’s a great tool to use when planning a large wedding.

1. You will go over budget. Don’t be naive about the money it will take to make your wedding happen. Just count on going over. I see it happen every time.

2. Think of an upside down bell-curve: expect the beginning of your planning to be hectic, stressful,  and full of decision making. Then there will be a lull in planning followed by a crazy, stressful 1 month count down. Plan on it. (Also hire a wedding coordinator to help manage it.)

3. You will have trouble creating, cutting down and finalizing your guest list. Don’t break up with your fiance over this – it can be worked out!

4. You will have some guests who do not return their response cards and make it hard for you to chase them down by phone.

5. Your groomsmen will take their sweet time to complete their tux rentals.

6. Not everything will turn out exactly how you envisioned it – sometimes better, sometimes not as great.

7.  At the end of the wedding day, you will be married and that is what matters most!

Buying “off the registry” is a gamble.  Most engaged couples these days assume that guests will check out their gift registry. Registries are a great tool to see what the couple really needs and wants for their new life together. I’m sure we’ve all heard our mothers talking about how they received 4 waffle irons, 6 crockpots, 12 gravy boats, 4000 coasters but no silverware. People love to give gifts that they are sure the couple will need. There’s usually nothing wrong with purchasing a gift that is not on a registry but when the registries are available try and use them.

Registries aren’t fool proof though. I registered for one 9×13 Pyrex baking dish and received 8 of them! Sometimes people forget to take the purchased items off the registry. Luckily most stores are great with exchanges and returns. We were just visiting with some friends of our who got married this summer and were laughing about their 3 different, everyday salt and pepper shakers. They had only registered for one type, but a couple guests just wanted to be sure they didn’t go without seasoning their meals! When in doubt, use the registry.

Seriously ask yourself this question. Are all the planning, details, glitter and glamor for you and your soon-to-be spouse or is it for everyone invited who witnesses your wedding day? I think it’s for the guests.

Obviously, I believe that the actual covenant that takes place on your wedding day is for the bride and groom alone and, yes, the wedding is all about the couple. But what is the point of dressing up a table, creating place cards, printing programs, or hiring a DJ if the wedding celebration is for you? You don’t need to be reminded of the order of service or where each guest eats dinner. We make weddings beautiful for our guests in order that they might see how excited we are to be sharing with them in our most special day.

If a wedding celebration is for the guests, then think about how you can make the experience the best for your guests. This means taking time to plan out the details, hire a coordinator to keep the flow of things going, use real dishes instead of paper products, if it’s a hot summer day provide AC and bug spray, if it’s cold then provide a heated room, hire a caterer who provides the clean-up service. Each and every decision made to improve your invited guests’ experiences will not be forgotten.

The best weddings are the ones where guests walk away thinking, “What a wonderful time we just had. I’m glad we were invited to this wedding.”

Invitations are traditionally sent out 6-8 weeks before the wedding date. Any less than that may cut too close to the date of getting a final head count to your vendors. If you want to send them out more than 8 weeks in advance, allow plenty of time for replies to come back to you. Try not to send them more than 10 weeks in advance. You don’t want guests to have so much time that they forget about the wedding weekend when it finally arrives.

Reply cards, i.e. “The favour of your reply is requested by Month Date, Year”, are best dated at one month prior to your wedding day. This will leave a bit of room for the forgetful guests to return their replies before your final head counts and payments are due.

And only the bride should wear white. If you’ve thought about wearing a white dress to a wedding before and decided against it, I applaud you. Ladies, stay away from the white dress when it’s not your day. I’m not talking about dresses with white accents or patterns or even some floral prints with a white background. Stay clear of the white sun dresses, the White House Black Market dresses that are mostly white, the white formal dress, etc. White is for the bride and occasionally the groom.

Rule of thumb: If you have to ask yourself if a dress too white for a wedding, put it back and make another selection.

Jason Keefer Photography

Save-the-dates are a fabulous little way to, well, save the date of your wedding. They are typically sent out 6 to 8 months before the wedding day. They aren’t as necessary much after that, especially with personalized wedding websites being the thing to do. StD’s are a great way to inform long distance relatives and those needing to plan for travel arrangements of the exact dates well in advance.

Here’s few fun sites to check out for ordering Save-the-Dates:

Serendipity Designs

Save the Date Magnets (this company has great phone customer service)

Paper Style

Be very mindful of the relationship between your ceremony start time and the type of reception you offer.  I know this can get tricky when you are trying to save money or do things on a tight budget. Many people think, “I’ll get married at noon or one o’clock and then have an hor d’oeuvres receptions,” or, “I’ll get married in the evening and have a drinks and desserts reception.” It is totally possible to do that, however not the best, most thoughtful way. If you can only afford an hor d’oeuvres reception, plan your ceremony time at a mid-meal point in the day – such as 2pm or 3pm. This way your guests will have already eaten lunch and your reception will end before the dinner hours are up allowing them to grab dinner on their way home. If a dessert reception is all you want to offer, then again, place your ceremony at a mid-meal time of day or late at night. In the event of an evening wedding with desserts only, try not to have a ceremony earlier than 7pm and make it loud and clear on your invitations that it will be a dessert only reception. If you have an evening ceremony between 5-6pm and do desserts only, consider allowing extra time between the ceremony and reception start time so that guests can grab a quick dinner somewhere on the way.

Typically, wedding receptions should look like this:

• 7am-10am Ceremony Start Time: Brunch Reception
• 11am-1pm Ceremony Start Time: Lunch Reception
• 2pm-3pm Ceremony Start Time: Hors d’oeuvres, Cocktail Reception
• 4pm-7pm Ceremony Start Time: Dinner Reception
• 8pm on Ceremony Start Time: Dinner, Cocktail or Dessert Reception

It’s not always fun to figure these logistics out. If you are dealing with a site location that only has certain time slots available for your ceremony, pick the one that allows you to have the type of reception you can afford. A word to the wise: Everyone is happier when they’ve been fed!

Don’t be afraid to admit that your favorite part about a wedding is the cake. Bride and groom pay attention – if your wedding cake isn’t tasty and delicious some of your guests are going to be sad. Believe me, I know it to be true.

Most North American weddings still do the traditional cake cutting during the reception. It’s a fun time to bring the whole party together again, focused once more on the newlyweds. For some brides and grooms, this is their only chance to get to taste their own wedding cake. They get a quick little piece shoved in their mouth and no more because there is still more dancing to be done or more hugs to squeeze in. Don’t let this happen to you. Ask your caterer to pack a to-go box of a few slices of cake that can be placed in your get-away car for later that night. The cake usually won’t taste as good a week later and definitely won’t be up to par a year later when you thaw it out to eat it for your anniversary!

My husband wishes that we had done this at our wedding. Every time he’s reminded of our wedding he says, “Man, I never got to eat a slice of my German chocolate groom’s cake!” One of these days I’m gonna have to go back to our baker and ask her to make a small version of the groom’s cake again. Some bakers have a special deal where they replicate the top layer of your wedding cake for you on your 1 year anniversary. That’s fabulous because then you don’t have to put up with a big frozen cake in the freezer for a year!

Great Charlottesville, VA Bakers: Cakes Unlimited and The Baker’s Palette

How cute are these girls? The bride wore the gold shoes in the middle and she let each of her bridesmaids pick out a fun, funky shoe to wear. The dresses were T Length so you could see every bit of shoe. It was so fun and didn’t throw the uniformed look off at all. Try something unique like this in your bridal party!