Feeling the Pressure

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday. I know I did. Over Thanksgiving a significant milestone passed..the 200 day mark. If that wasn't pressure enough I was met with many a "How's the planning going?", "Did you book a DJ ?", "I haven't receive the STD yet" from family members eager to hear about the progress of our wedding. I'll admit it. I was feeling the pressure big time.

After getting the big things out of the way my planning slowed a bit. Plus- all the stress with my fiance's health left a couple of projects up in the air. It's not that I haven't done anything, its just that I haven't really finished anything. Well, today I decided it was time to slay a couple of big dragons starting with our STD. We have created three different STD layouts a couple of months ago but have yet to decide on one. I will scan all three for you all to see!

But- before all that can happen we had to complete the following boring and tedious tasks:

1. finish our wedding website
2. finish our prelim. guest list
3. Update names and addresses

All three needed to be complete ASAP, so this morning the fiance and I buckled down and got to work. I have been engaged long enough to know just how many wedding planning products and websites there were out there - so I knew there would be something out there that would help me streamline the process.

I figured I would start with by looking at 3 websites I knew offered free websites/planning pages:
Martha Stewart Weddings
MyWedding
theknot.com

I started with Martha because I heard good things about the planning tools and I figured I visit the website weekly anyway so it would be nice if all of my tools were there as well. First thing I realized is that although there were lots of nice planning tools, there was no wedding website option. I was hoping that they had partnered with a hosting website but no luck. This was a BIG strike for me. I am trying to minimize the accounts, subscriptions, and log-ins I have so I really wanted a one- stop shopping place. I tried out some of the tools anyway, but I was unimpressed. The layout was too corporate for me and reminded me of Microsoft Outlook and the guest list manager tool wouldn't work on my Mac. No Martha for me.

Next I tried Mywedding.com, a free website hosting site that promised to link your website with planning tools. At first the page looks really promising. It had a modern hop layout that fit my sense of style. It seems to have lots of tools and our website address would not be very long...just mywedding.com/mynamehisnameourlastname . They also offer layouts from Hello Lucky and Wedding Paper Divas. All seemed great until I actually started the design of the site. First - you can't change color, font, or layout. It is not very flexible in terms of photo size or font. Finally, I realized that all of the "tools" were really more like advertisements. It basically asked you to provide lots of information so they could "match" you with vendors . More importantly it had no guest list manager. Not mywedding.

Finally I landed at theknot. So many of us start our wedding journeys at theknot. I know I did. It was the first place I went to after I was engaged and the launching pad for so many of my wedding plans. But, once I discovered so many other blogs, I sort of forgot about theknot. I hadn't been back in awhile and began to think of it as the "costco " of wedding blogs. But- I gave it a shot. Right away I noticed that it had a lot of nicely designed layouts and a lot of flexibility on colors and font. It took me a while to figure out how to link and add extra pictures but in the end I got it. It also links to their guest list manager - which is awesome. As guest RSVP on the website it will check them off on my list. The guest list also allows you to classify guest as "family" , "wedding party", "single", or "out of town" and then make lists. You can also generate lots of invite lists for the shower, rehearsal dinner, and brunch. After a long day of work the fiance and I managed to use all of theknot's offerings and created a very lovely wedding website and a very manageable and up to date guest list database. The only downside was our wedding website address was way too long:
www.theknot/ourwedding/johnandmarytomac ( or something like this)

So the fiance had the great idea to buy a domain name and redirect it to the site. While johnandmary.com was $2000, maryandjohnswedding.com was only $ 10. Hooray!

In the end theknot.com really came through and me and the fiance had a very productive day. The website is not totally finished but if you want you should ch-ch-check it out.

MaryandJohnswedding.com