Oooh I do love a bit of technology. Jack loves a bit of technology. We’re pretty much an Apple household. So when I suggested we get our own wedding app, Jack was really excited by the idea.
I’d come across Appy Couple on Pinterest about a year ago. A friend of mine was engaged and whenever I saw something cool I passed it on to her. She loved the idea but, luckily for us, she never used it. I don’t know anyone who’s had a wedding app before, but I quite like the idea of doing something a bit “modern.”
Usually I would wonder if anyone would use the app or find it useful, but back in 2011 I went to a wedding in Cornwall, six hours away from home. In my rush to pack and leave the house before 6:00 AM, I stupidly forgot the invitation and other important details. Thank goodness I’d been messaging the bride on Facebook and had all the details in a message; otherwise I’d have had to call her—and I doubt a girl wants to know that her guests are lost!
As we are having a sort of destination wedding (in the sense that all our guests live at least two to three hours away), we figured having this information on a phone could end up being useful. And I think an app is pretty cool thing to have, anyway.
I didn’t look at any other apps if I’m honest. I liked this one and stuck with it!
We went through a number of themes before finally settling on this one, which we think matches our invitations nicely.
It came as no surprise to many of our friends and family that I had a URL secured and a wedding website built less than two days after Mr. Plane popped the question. While I don’t consider my page to be anything extravagant, or even overly original, I wanted a space that we could direct our guests to that would contain pertinent information without being too complicated to navigate. If you’re looking to do something similar, here’s a preview of what I did.
(All images screenshotted by yours truly—some photos by studiOsnap, others personal)
First up, the homepage (please excuse the blackouts).
Our URL was simple: Mr.PlaneFirstNameAndMissAirplaneFirstName’sWedding.com. I used WordPress to create the site with the help of the theme Forever by Automattic. Again—super simple, clean, bright. Exactly what I wanted. Along the top you can see the menu of options for guests to choose from. Under our photo is kind of a highlight of what visitors might need at first glance.
When we started planning our wedding, I knew that I wanted to create a wedding website for our guests. It’s a great and easy way for guests to access wedding information. Moreover, you can start using it well before sending out your invites (we included our address on our save the dates), and you can include as much or as little information as you like.
Although I would have liked to program our homepage from scratch, I didn’t have the time as I was about to graduate from university. I chose a less time-consuming path—creating our website with iWeb on my Mac. It is an easy to handle program to create homepages with. Check our Mrs. Cupcake’s detailed tutorial if you’re interested. The only caveat is that you need a domain/server to host your self-made website.
Luckily, we didn’t have to look far to host our website. Being part of a techie family, my dad has his own domain and server. He agreed to let me use it for our wedding website and we had the simple URL of www.name.de/wedding.
I spent a long time thinking about which topics to include. I wanted the navigation to be intuitive for our guests. They should be able to find the information where they would be looking for it. I created the header in Photoshop using one of our favorite engagement photos by Legacy. We included the following categories and subcategories:
Hive! I’ve given you nearly everything I have, between The Packet, The Schedule, The Spreadsheet, and The Cards, but I do want to offer one last thing that might be helpful if you’re at the very beginning of your planning—The Checklist.
This post is somewhat of a continuation on having a plugged-in wedding. I already noted that I wanted to encourage the use of cell phones and cameras during our wedding—especially during the reception. To try to get more people to take pictures, I created the I Spy cards I told you about earlier. But then of course there’s the issue of actually getting the pictures.
Many of our friends and relatives have smart phones, so we looked into paid apps like Wedding Snap or Snap the Wedding. In the end, we just didn’t want to allot any amount of money toward this when 1.) We were already paying a professional photographer and 2.) We weren’t sure how many people would actually download the app and take pictures with it. We also weren’t sure about those who had cameras—why pay for a service when only half of the guests at the wedding could use it?
We moved on from this idea and set about creating a wedding website. We decided on mywedding.com (more on how we chose a wedding website later). While setting up our free website, we noticed that they had a wedding app available for download and integration, at no extra cost. Thinking it probably wasn’t all that great, I downloaded it to test it anyway.
Kind of a cute icon! Once you open up the app and join our wedding, you see a screen like this.
Well hello again, hive! So, we’ve covered a few organizational things—The Schedule, The Packet, and the Card. I hope they’ve been helpful in planning! Today I’m writing about The Spreadsheet—which, in a fit of melodrama, I named All The Things. 
In the beginning, my wedding planning was almost derailed by Pinterest—I wanted every single detail that I saw. Toasting flutes, engraved cake forks, chair signs, paper lanterns, tissue poofs…all the things! As McGlovin and I started to form a wedding vision, though, it became easier to edit ideas. Once I returned to a rational state of being, I started a Google spreadsheet where I could keep track of all of these ideas, so I could pick and choose what we wanted at our wedding.
Oh, hive…I know some of you were a little over whelmed with The Schedule. That’s OK…let’s be real, creating a schedule for that many people to follow for an entire day is a little overwhelming. Here’s the thing, though—there’s more. So very much more.
Right, so we have The Schedule. But…I mean, what good is it, except that I have it and can read it? Me having all of the knowledge is nice, but essentially useless. I mentioned at the end of my last post that the most important thing was to give someone else the schedule on the day of the wedding, and it really is! So who did I give the schedule to? Well…everyone. Enter: The Packet.
OK, so the schedule. A few things you should know—I started crafting our schedule about six months before the wedding, and I reviewed it at every single vendor meeting that we had. (Truly, my biggest fear was that I would forget to do something, or go somewhere, or be somehow unprepared for our wedding—I had at least four nightmares about it!) Anyway, I reviewed the schedule with the reception venue, the catering staff, the DJ, and the photographer. Each of them had very definite ideas of how the schedule should go and, although it certainly helped me to have their suggestions on how things would flow best, I didn’t always take their advice. Even though I’ve never had a wedding before, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted things to flow.
Example: Our DJ originally told us to cut the cake and then go right downstairs for the first dance. I was all, “What, I don’t get to eat the wedding cake that I paid a million dollars for, or all of the wedding pie??” And he was all, “No, the people will get antsy, and no one wants to sit back down for dessert!” Then, on the wedding night, he came over and let us know that there was a pretty substantial line for wedding pie, so we would need to push the first dance out 15 minutes. Of course we would need to wait—don’t you know anything about pie?
Anyway. Here’s how the schedule was created. First, I opened one of my trusty Google spreadsheets. I used column A to schedule the entire day in 15-minute increments. Then, as I was made aware of when things would happen, I added them in. Here’s my example:
So a few months ago, FH told me about this free new app that was specifically designed for couples to privately communicate with each other on their smart phones. Instead of utilizing regular text messaging, you and your boo download the app, create a password, and from there have the ability to chat with each other in a private space. Since downloading, they’ve added some awesome features over the past few months like to-do lists (which you both can virtually create and add to at any time—very handy when grocery shopping), but the best new feature is the calendar.
Image via Avocado.io
Oh hi, hive! Remember me? (Probably not—that’s OK, though. 
) I think with just over 100 days (WHERE HAS MY TIME GONE!?) to go, it’s time to start talking about the things that we aren’t including in our wedding. Or wedding planning, in this case. Today, I’m talking about why we aren’t having a wedding website.
Websites by MyWedding / Photo by Matt Ramos Photography / How cute are these!?
With our wedding less than six months away, I thought I’d share with you some things that have worked well for us so far in this destination-wedding process. A destination wedding requires a lot of time, patience, and effort, but what good is all that if you haven’t properly communicated the details with your potential guests? I’m sure the same is true for local weddings too, so here are some tips on keeping your guests informed.
Image via Etsy shop MyPrimitiveBoutique
We had our date picked about 13 months before the actual day, so we started verbally (and virtually) communicating this to our closest friends and family to ensure that our VIPs would informally save the date.
To me, Pinterest is without a doubt the best thing to happen to the internet in a long time. Remember back in the day when you would tear out pages from magazines for all things cool? Whether it was an outfit, hairstyle, makeup product, famous celebrity, inspirational quote, or dream vacation spot, we’ve all done that at one point or another to keep track of things we wanted or aspired to. Well, those days of old-school page-tearing have now become obsolete since Pinterest came onto the scene.
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Image via IdeaElevator.co
A coworker introduced me to Pinterest about a week after I got engaged, and I was instantly hooked. I first used it early on to find inspiration for wedding gowns. I had no idea what style I wanted so would just scour the web (and Pinterest) looking for what would ultimately be the perfect dress. What’s really funny is the dress I ended up falling in love with (and purchasing) was one of the first things I pinned. Sometimes you know yourself better than you think!
After creating dress boards, I became a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of material out there to pin, so I started creating specific boards to help organize my thoughts. I created ones for wedding looks, cakes & flowers, save-the-date cards, wedding shoes, wedding photos wish list, groom style, and more. Here are examples of some of my actual boards below.
Where is the LAST place a newly engaged couple should go two weeks after they get engaged?
a bridal show
That’s right. At a hotel, with hundreds of vendors, flashy dresses, bags of brochures, and, yes, cake. Talk about overwhelming times 500! OK, let me back up. After we got engaged, I happened to hear about a bridal show right next to my work that very weekend! It felt like fate. I was so eager to jump on the wedding-planning bandwagon and I wanted Mr. Squirrel to be just as invested, so of course I bribed him with, “There will be A LOT of free cake to try.”
What can I say, I know my man well…
So with the location set, it was time to delve into the nitty-gritty details. Planning a wedding is already no easy feat, so imagine throwing hundreds of miles and a different country into the mix (yikes!).
Clearly I’ve never planned a wedding before, so with no prior knowledge (other than my kick-ass research and organizational skills) here are the first three things I did to get started…
Start with wedding books. If you are like me, you really don’t know anything about weddings and wedding planning, so start by getting your knowledge on. My favorite site in the world is Amazon, and they have a plethora of wedding-related books, from organizational binders to advice for destination and budget weddings. Here are some of the books I ordered that I found invaluable and subsequently recommended to recently engaged friends:
The Ultimate Wedding Planner & Organizer by Alex A. Lluch / Image: Amazon.com
I might be an engineer by trade, but I am in no means a computer science engineer. I know very little about coding, website development, JAVA, HTML…? I speak four languages but computer programming is not one of them. Mr. Wallaby is a little more tech savvy than me—last year for Halloween, we made our own costumes (see photo below): Mr. W was the new iPhone and I was the original iPod, and those are pretty accurate descriptions of our levels of ability in computing.Yet with Mr. W’s help I developed a pretty cool wedding website, and I am here to show you how.
Halloween 2011 / Personal photo
We started out by creating one of the free wedding websites on The Knot. However, a couple weeks later, I encountered this gem (and this and this and definitely this!) and grew green with envy. I LOVE typography and cool buttons on websites. However, I am not exceptionally skilled at using Photoshop or any web design program, so I decided to seek a happy medium and find another free website with a wider variety of templates than The Knot. I found some beautiful templates on Wedding Window and Wedding Jojo. I ended up going another route, though—another bee recommended building a website with flash from wix.com, so I decided to give that a try.
Wix offers hundreds (or thousands?) of free templates that are very easily customized. There are tons of features and widgets, such as guestbooks, photo mosaics, mobile sites compatible with iPhones and Androids, and even a widget that allows website viewers to send you a message to your email. I signed up, chose a template, and incorporated all of these features in just a couple hours. Here’s the result:
