Wedding planning can be stressful, especially if you’re doing a lot of it yourself. I kept a lot of digital lists and used a physical wedding planner, but I’m not sure my wedding would have been as organized without these three must-have resources below.
1. Wedding Wire Account
One of the first things I did after I got engaged was get a Wedding Wire account. They have a few tools that I loved using.
- Wedding Checklist: The checklist keeps you on track by month.
- Vendor Manager: I also got an account to research vendor options in Austin, especially venues and caterers. You can easily mark who you are considering, make notes about each vendor, and then add them to your vendor list after you booked.
- Budget Manager: This tool I discovered later and then I couldn’t live without it. It helped me keep track of our budget, estimated and actual.
Wedding Wire also has tools for keeping a guest list, creating a registry, making a seating chart, and creating a wedding website.
2. Zola Account
I initially got a Zola account because they had the lowest fees for a cash fund registry (2.5%), but I quickly discovered they had many other benefits all in one place.
- Registry: Since we did not need many household items, we were planning on the majority of our registry to be a cash fund for our honeymoon, future date nights, and home repairs. In addition to the cash fund, they have tons of products you can easily add to your registry. They provide free shipping and returns. You can choose when your gifts are shipped to you so that they’re not sitting on your doorstep while you’re on your honeymoon. Plus, when your guest buys a gift but you’ve changed your mind about it, you can exchange it for another gift before it ships. If there are gifts left in your registry after your wedding, you get 20% off when you buy them.
- Wedding Website: A wedding website is useful to give more information to guests and Zola offers easy templates to create them. The registry is cohesively included as one of your website pages. I liked their website options and design better than Wedding Wire.
- RSVPs: I love this feature because it helped me keep track of RSVPs all in one place. I sent a specific Zola link to collect email addresses for our save-the-dates and physical addresses for our printed invitations. We included our website URL instead of RSVP cards in our invitation, so when guests came to our website, they could easily RSVP.
3. Wedding Day-Of Coordinator
I planned all of our wedding, so I knew the details in and out. But I knew I did not want to have to stress over any detail on my wedding day and I didn’t want to put this stress on any of my wedding guests. Being able to hand over all the plans, the timeline, and the vendor list to my day-of coordinator was a relief. Looking back on our wedding day, I don’t know how I could have got through the day without our day-of coordinator. I recommend Alanna with Simply Sweet Weddings!
Before the wedding day, we had several meetings to go over details and she was in contact with vendors for final details about two months before the day. In addition to guiding our rehearsal and coordinating all the vendors upon arrival, she kept track of time to make sure everything was on schedule and helped with set-up and break-down.
If you need extra help in planning your wedding, you could get a full-on wedding planner or a month-of coordinator to help you out.
Conclusion
These things may seem simple, but they were a big help in keeping me organized and sane.
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