Shortly after I proposed to Kate we began to start the wedding planning process. In fact, it was 5 days after the proposal that we began to plan for our wedding. I was amazed that I was able to convince her to enjoy the recent engagement for nearly a week. To be fair, this is something that she’s been dreaming and planning since she can remember. For me, it’s something that I knew I wanted to experience with her and that was about as far as I had gotten (beyond the actual proposal of course).
Wedding Planning: Guest List, Venue & Website
If there’s one thing that we have an abundance of, it’s friends and family that have already been through this process. Thankfully, we have a lot of resources when it comes to planning our wedding. Of course, Kate and I didn’t waste any time reading up on blogs, signing up for their email newsletters and creating a checklist of “to-dos”. We love check lists. I’m surprised we both don’t give each other chore lists and gold stars when we complete them – Perhaps I’ll add this to the list.
The first thing we knew we had to do was get a rough estimate of how many people we wanted to invite to our wedding. We had occasionally talked about this in passing throughout our relationship, and we were both happy with a big or small wedding. As we started compiling the wedding guest list we quickly realized how many friends and family we wanted to be part of this special day. Big wedding it is! During this process, we also put together our wedding party list. This has yet to be revealed as we are trying to figure out the perfect way to ask each member!
Once we had a rough idea of how many people would be in our wedding party and invited to the wedding, we were able to start looking for the perfect wedding venue. The key here is to have a general idea of how much you’d like your wedding budget to be and how many people you are planning to show up. With wedding venues, there are a lot of key points to consider and pricing varies a lot depending on the number of guests. Of course venues will have a max occupancy, set number of chairs/tables included in the pricing packages and may even charge a “per-head” price depending on food vendors. That brings up another point: each venue has different requirements and fees for just about anything you could think of. The worst part so far was realizing how few of these venues have websites. If they have a website, it’s probably from 1998. As two professionals in the digital marketing industry, this was frustrating. I think it’s time to start a new business!
Speaking of websites, I knew were my skills could be applied immediately. Kate texted me and asked if I could setup a shared email account so we could start sending wedding information to it. Duh. Yes. So I took it a step further and bought this domain, setup a couple of email aliases that she could easily setup on her phone, and started to build the website. This obviously isn’t so easy for everyone, so there’s plenty of “wedding websites” out there that let you plug your content into a template. I’m not entirely sure if, or how much they charge you for this but I hope it isn’t much. All this content really just helps their main site show up in the search engines. I know too much.
Everything considered, I would say our wedding planning is going very well! We are learning a lot, staying organized and having fun while doing it.