Bliss

Feel, look, live beautiful … together

Dana Schwartz & Vanessa LaFaso Stolarski

Your heads are spinning with details of your big day and dreams of living happily ever after. Ease into your life together with ideas for before, during and after your walk down the aisle.

 

Digital Days of Our Lives
Wedding planning clicks into place with helpful online tools

While the term “bridezilla”may be used loosely these days, it’s pretty clear that modern-day brides know what they want and have done their homework for making it happen. The modern-day bride’s best friend? The Internet.

Susan Smith, a planner with Simply Elegant Weddings in McLean, believes that the Internet is the number one planning resource for brides. See if your wedding colors coordinate with your bridesmaid dresses, blog with other brides and even design your own wedding invitations.

We’ve compiled some useful planning websites to help the bride who wants to have control over her wedding.

But use the Internet sparingly. Smith recently discovered that research suggests, not too surprisingly, brides have let wedding planning take over their lives.

“I actually learned in a meeting that the majority of brides are on the Internet from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m,” she said.

Tying the Knot Made Simple
Some websites look at the big picture for couples, taking care of checklists, budgets and wedding web pages for guests to view. Most of these sites also have message boards and blogs for brides to ask other brides for advice and opinions.

WeddingWire is a free site with social networking capabilities, a local vendor search feature, comparison shopping and wedding planning tools all based on their database of more than 15,000 vendors. Brides can use the interactive question and answer section and discussion section for advice and the helpful links page to post websites and articles they like for other brides to use.

Ewedding offers free services with a premium service of $9.95 monthly or $89 for the year. The premium service gives couples options like unlimited photo space, a guest book, an online R.S.V.P., honeymoon information, registry, maps and directions for out-of-town guests.

All of these sites offer couples a wide selection of wedding ideas and tools that are streamlined in one space, which eliminates the potential to confuse the details.

Meredith Tomasula, a planner with Elegant Engagements in Alexandria, said websites such as Wedding Wire are a great place to start doing research, but advised brides-to-be not to get too lost in all of the information.

“The best thing about the Internet is that they get to see all of the ideas and concepts online,” she said. “But brides actually can get really overwhelmed with all of the options that they need a planner to help them hold it all together.”

Dresses for Success
David’s Bridal has taken wedding dress shopping to another level. With their “Dress Your Wedding” tool  brides can experiment with different trends, colors, fashions and accessories to create the wedding dress of their dreams. From there they can visualize what their whole wedding party will look like with matching bridesmaid dresses and tuxedos—personalizing it to the point of hair colors and styles, facial features and skin tone options.

Brides can view how dresses would look up against a background specific to the location of the wedding, from a beach to a formal banquet room. Add flowers to see how the colors would coordinate with the dresses. Up to 10 personal wedding albums can be saved and shared with friends and family members, and visitors can save their scenes and return to work on them when they have more time.

“The dress tool is very beneficial for brides, especially because brides are so Internet-savvy these days. They can go online and try different things out instead of having to go to a store and pick Dress A off of the shelf for their bridesmaids,” Tomasula said.

Carin Rosenberg Levine, owner of Hitched Salon in Washington, D.C., thinks it’s a great idea for brides to spend time online when searching for their dresses, especially to avoid surprises like high prices.

When it comes to doing research on dresses online, Rosenberg Levine said it’s also beneficial when brides come prepared to her store, and she definitely recommends that brides visit designers’ websites to learn about what kind of dress they might want.

Pictures in a Snap
Couples painstakingly plan for a wedding a year or two in advance, all for the day to pass in a flash, so photographs are crucial. Searching for photographers online is made easy by the websites mentioned earlier, but what about sharing your photographs with guests so that they can relive the day with you? Many photographers are now posting the wedding photos online for the couple and guests to view and order online.

“Photographers putting the wedding photos online is very popular these days; it’s an easy way for friends and family members to see the pictures and order them, which they never really had the opportunity to do in the past,” Tomasula said.

There are also several ways to share photos with guests and create scrapbooks, including those offered by websites such as www.snapfish.com and www.kodak.com.

DIY R.S.V.P.
Creating the perfect wedding invitation has become virtually painless. Couples are now using websites to create free wedding templates that they can print out at home. Websites such as Southworth (www.southworth.com) and The Paper Mill Store provide printer-ready templates that not only allow the couple to personalize their invitations exactly how they want to, but also save a lot of time.

Tomasula said that although printing invitations up for showers and bridal parties is popular, she has noticed that most brides still don’t mind paying extra for their wedding invitations.

“They want to touch and feel the paper; they don’t want a cheap invitation to go out for their special day,” she said.

However, with the help of any craft store, do-it-yourselfers can find the paper, stock and embellishments that suit their tastes and bridal theme.

Flowers and Colors and Blogs, Oh My!
Do you want to experiment with different color palettes, but just go crazy with all of the paper swatches? Are you not sure what flowers are in season for your wedding? Is your best man the worst speechwriter of all time? Enter Bliss! Weddings. The wedding color palette tool helps mix and match different color swatches to find the best-looking combination. The floral generator is a database that helps brides search for flowers based on color, season, bridesmaid dresses and even region of the country.

The tongue-tied best man will find another helpful tool on the site: Bliss! Weddings has a wedding toast generator that takes the bride’s, groom’s and parents’ names and allows the user to choose the introduction section, content section and closing section, resulting in the perfect wedding toast.

Wedding planners, too, are creating websites that detail their services, as well as their own blogs. Tomasula started a wedding blog on her company’s website to keep clients up to date on trends in the planning business. “Blogs are huge right now; it’s a personal way to connect with the brides. They want to read something more personal rather than articles that are up on websites for the general public.”

Many wedding planners advise doing research and staying organized online, but note that nothing beats seeing your flowers or meeting your photographer in person.

“The Internet is a great tool for learning and exploring,” Rosenberg Levine said. “But brides still need to be open-minded when they go to do their planning. Things that look good online might not always look great in person. Use the Internet as a resource, and be open to changes that may happen.”

 

(December 2007)

Tags: wedding