Weddingbee Blog

Squidoo (a super cool site made up of “experts” that create mini sites or “lenses” on all sorts of great topics) is having their Best Lens of The Year contest right now, and guess who’s up? Yep, little ole me and my Wedding Planning For Cool Chicks Lens.

If you want to vote for me, Click here and vote away! I think you might need to login, but its worth it–we need to represent, brides!

A lot of people my and Mr. Blueberry’s age know about Facebook–an online community that started at the university level, but has now expanded to allow everyone–sort of like Myspace. One thing I really like about Facebook is their group/event options–you can create an event, which can be anything from a club meeting to a house party; or you can create a group, which can range from “people who <3 Rice-a-roni” to “Students for alternative energy.” Some people create groups or events for their weddings, bachelor/ette parties, or bridal showers, too! (Not that I would recommend a Facebook invite being your only form of invitation!)

Of course, I had to create a Facebook group for our wedding!

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Recently I discovered the convenience of clicking on someone’s name when they comment on weddingbee, and seeing where it takes you. Sometimes it’s their knot bio and sometimes a personal website. I’ve noticed so many of you have wedding websites (we have one too), and I’ve loved checking them out and seeing the pictures of your planning! Also, it is fun to put a face with a name.

We made our wedding website so that it has links of things to do in the area for our guests, driving directions and maps, a place for them to upload their photos, and a blog where I keep our guests informed of where we are in the planning process.

There seems to be many options for free or inexpensive wedding websites (like on the knot), but we actually created our site ourselves. Miss Strawberry asked who designed my invitation website, so I’d like to recommend Martin Zager if you’re looking for someone to build a site or blog for you. He does great work - you can see his website here, and his own wedding blog here.

So what about you guys… Who, why and how did you make your wedding website?

For those of you actively planning your honeymoon, be sure to check out http://www.kayak.com/. This site is your all-in-one vacation trip planner, which I found especially helpful for finding the best bang for my buck when purchasing airline tickets.

When you conduct a search using the days and locations you’ll be flying to and from, Kayak searches hundreds of airline sites and other discount sites to bring up a comprehensive list of airline tickets, which you can customize to view by prices, airlines, departure times, flight lengths, or number of stops. Below the lowest price Kayak has found, it lists the places you can purchase the tickets from for that price (directly from the airline, cheaptickets.com, aa.com, among others), as well as other vendors’ prices for the same ticket. You can choose where you ultimately end up buying your tickets, and Kayak redirects you to whichever site you pick. Happy Kayak-ing!

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For all the SoCal brides out there, check out labridezilla.com. A former LA knottie started it as a place for vendor reviews from real brides to be gathered in one spot. The interface isn’t the prettiest as it’s message-board style, but overall it is pretty easy to use. I personally have used it to gather potential vendors as well as narrow down my very long lists that I start out with for each vendor category.

For any brides out there who are already married, I encourage you to add your reviews on vendors you may have used to make it even more helpful to other future brides. Especially if you already have them in a knot bio on your blog, or written up elsewhere. Copy/paste is easy and fun!

Some tips for posting reviews:

1. Read the ’sticky’ announcement that is the first post before posting anything.

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Hi Mrs.Bee!

Thought you’d like to share this with the weddingbee fans. If they’re anything like me, then they love a good bargain. Here is a list of websites that actually do the research for you by looking for great online deals.

www.mybargainbuddy.com
www.ableshopper.com
www.dealnews.com
www.bensbargains.net
www.dealsofamerica.com
www.slickdeals.net

- Jen A.

Bargainist is a new site that features coupons, sales, and freebies. Some good deals featured on there now include:

• 15% off Ann Taylor Loft purchases online
• 25% off Claire’s Accessories in stores (great place to buy jewelry and gifts for your flowergirl)
• 60% off gift certificates at Restaurant.com (good as gifts or for date night)

And many more. Happy Shopping!

(via Oh Joy!)

Ihateweddings.com is so mean…just reading some of the horrible things that people were saying made me cry.

I can understand not being all *that* excited about someone’s wedding, and I even agree with some things they are saying on the site, but they just went waaay over the top :(.

Although I ended up paying for a wedding website, Wedding Announcer has many of the features of other wedding websites you have to pay an arm and a leg for. You get your own domain, (http://brideandgroom’snames.weddingannouncer.com/), it’s simple to use, you have several different layouts to choose from and did I mention it’s free? It’s the best “free” website I’ve seen as far as features and aesthetics. I’ve recommended it to my friends who are also getting married and they’ve been really happy.

You can:
Inform guests about your wedding events
Include background info on how you met
Display Your Gift Registry Information
Share accomodations, restaurants & attractions
Include maps & driving directions
Personal guest book
Share wedding day pictures with your guests

Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s the real deal! Check it out!

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Okay, here y’all go as promised! I probably left out a bunch so feel free to add to this list! I hope I didn’t make up any… like BS. hahaha.

B2B - bride to be
BIL - brother-in-law
BM - bridesmaid
BS - bridal shower
DFH - dear future husband
DH - dear husband
E-ring - engagement ring
FFIL - future father-in-law
FG - flower girl
FH - future husband
FOB - father of the bride
FW - future wife
G2B - groom to be
GM - groomsmen
HM - honeymoon
MOB - mother of the bride
MOH - maid of honor
SIL - sister-in-law
SO - significant other
STD - save the date

I am currently on a site called Yelp! - it has reviews on businesses by real people like you and I. I use it a lot especially for wedding related things such as invitation/print shops and bakeries. So if you’re ever on it, go look at my reviews, add me or whatever else! I like it since it has a bunch of cities and you can see the good and the uglies of what others think. I hope this helps you as much it has helped me. You can find me here.

ps: my wonderful brother in law showed me this site gotta give him the credit!

It is officially crunch time! There are about three weeks left until our wedding and we have a lot to do still. Mr. Grasshopper and I have been using Backpackit.com to help us keep track of our shared wedding to do list. Mr. Grasshopper is an obsessive organizer (we refer to him as Captain Schedule) and hates the idea of having multiple to-do lists emailed or floating around, so we are relying on the free version of Backpackit to help us out.

Backpackit lets you create a document and invite others to edit the same file. Instead of 6 Word documents named todo_v1.doc, todo_v2.doc, etc., we have one shared document that can be easily accessed and updated from any computer. There are many software applications that allow multi-user editing, but so far this one has been rather easy to use and shows a great example on the site of how one could use it to help plan a wedding.

Our wedding to-do lists has the following categories:

Miss Grasshopper to-do (strangely the longest list…)
Mr. Grasshopper to-do
Shared to-do
Think about
Done! (my favorite list)