Computing Everywhere: How to plan your wedding online

Your wedding is a very special day. It's when you join with another person for the rest of your life. Friends, family, and more all gather together to celebrate your life-changing day. Your wedding should be fun, beautiful, and customized to represent who you are as a couple. Everything about your wedding should be magical and perfectly tailored to you. 

Planning your wedding, however, can be one of the most stressful things in your life. A wedding has a lot of moving parts including photographer, DJ, invitations, officiant, seating arrangements, and the list just goes on and on. There are hundreds of details that can be hard to keep track of, which is why many people opt to hire a professional wedding planner. Unfortunately, wedding planners are expensive, and not everyone can afford one.

Don't worry. The internet is here to help. There are dozens of online tools to help you plan your wedding and keep all those moving parts moving.

The Knot
TheKnot.com might be the single largest web resource for planning your wedding online. The Knot is packed with wedding ideas, listings for vendors like photographers and florists, a dress gallery, and a great deal more. The Knot is a huge, full-fledged web site; you could spend a week exploring it and still have plenty left to discover.

The Knot's wedding checklist is a life-saver for many brides and grooms who feel overwhelmed by the planning. It starts at the engagement, including tips like starting a wedding notebook and picking out wedding colors. Then, even after you're married, the checklist reminds you to do things like leave online reviews of your vendors and thank your guests for coming. Considering the sheer immensity of your wedding planning, the checklist is really a must-have.

The budget tool is another powerful feature from The Knot. Essentially, as you complete individual tasks, you can compile an ongoing budget for your wedding. You can play with the money you're willing to spend on each item, track those budget items against the number of guests who are attending, and otherwise compile an overall picture of your wedding finances. This budget tool is just as vital to an engaged couple as the checklist; little incidental costs are easily forgotten when you're planning your wedding, and this tool will help you keep track of everything.

Other wedding sites
To plan your wedding, you need to start envisioning how you want your wedding to look. Is it a beach wedding? A traditional church wedding? The options are nearly limitless because creative, unique weddings are more popular than ever. A great way to spark your own imagination is to look at what other people have done. The internet is full of wedding blogs to help you look for ideas.

Offbeat Bride has hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas for creative weddings. The blog features everything from garden weddings to surprise superhero wedding moments. While you probably will want to create your own, unique experience, Offbeat Bride has many ways to help you think of little details that are open to creativity. Style Me Pretty is another popular wedding blog. Featuring thousands of pictures from elegant, beautiful weddings, Style Me Pretty will help you find gorgeous ideas for a traditional wedding. Weddingbee is a wedding blog that's updated 25 times a day; the blog is certainly a flood of information about modern weddings. It's a lot to take in, but it's a nice place to look for little inspirations you can carry over to your own planning.

Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Google for Weddings. Google has included site templates, announcements, and save the date cards, just to name a few of the tools on the site. While you might not think of Google when you think of weddings, you can trust Google to do no evil to your wedding day.

Registries
An important part of setting up your wedding is choosing your wedding registry. Amazon is definitely the strongest choice for an online-only gift registry. Because Amazon's registry system is easy to use and spans so many product categories, you probably won't need any other registry.

For the folks in your life who want to go shopping at a brick-and-mortar store, most big box retailers have both an in-store and online gift registry. Buying a gift from one location will remove it from both. Pick a big box retailer convenient to most of your guests, and check out their website to set up your registry. For some examples, Target offers Club Wedd, and Sears and Walmart both offer reasonably named "Wedding Registry" services.

Take the time to read it all
We've talked about several wedding resources in this article. It may sound like a lot, but the most important thing you can do is set some time aside to read those sites. It's a huge undertaking, but these sites are powerful tools to help you make your wedding the event of your dreams. Take your time, read what the experts have to say, and get ready for the ride of your life.

[Image credit: Build Your Wings Photography]

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