These online resources will be your secret weapon for planning the big day. 

Planning a wedding is an exciting time.

For many couples it is the biggest party they’ll ever throw, but even a low-key function can easily turn into a stressful (and expensive) affair as details start to pile up and you’ve got no tricks up your sleeve to manage them.

Using online resources to your advantage as you plan the big day can remove alot of the heavy lifting and ensure things run to your liking.

General wedding planning tools

One of the most popular online resources for all things bridal is the humble wedding blog.

If you’ve spent any time exploring this area, you’ll know there are a lot of options to choose from and it’s easy to lose hours exploring.

If time isn’t on your side, Aisle Society is a great place to concentrate your efforts.

This collective of 30+ of the most renowned wedding blogs is a hub for endless, well-curated wedding inspiration.

Having a bird’s eye view of all your wedding elements is the first step to planning paradise.

LadyMarry is a planner’s dream, a free online tool that checks off all of the particulars of a wedding and arranges them into one flexible calendar interface so you can see both big picture and the finer details.

If you’re planning a larger wedding, you may find a tool like AllSeated invaluable.

It’s a free online app that handles guest lists, scaled floor plans and seating arrangements with ease.

You’ll ensure the right people are seated in the right place and be able to make any last minute changes without dealing with countless sheets of paper or formatting woes.  

Aesthetics

Blogs and social networks like Pinterest are inspiration hubs for all elements of wedding style, which can often give you a clear idea of exactly what you’re after for any visual element of your wedding.

The Print Fairy, a home-grown operation, takes a cool and modern approach to wedding stationery (think letterpress, or invitations on wood), accessible no matter where you are in the country.

Getting a bit more-specific, Aussie-based shoe customisation service Shoes of Prey makes it possible for you to choose the shape, colour, and height of your shoes using a 3D designer tool. 

Co-ordinating guests

The more detailed the wedding, the more you’ll need to ensure guests have clear and concise information to follow, particularly for guests coming from out of town, or if yours is a destination event.

A website created specifically for your wedding can be a great way to communicate to your guests, keeping them across recent updates and connecting them to others in a way a printed information pack can’t.

The Print Fairy (mentioned above) offers a coordinating website service with Brides Notebook so your website can fit seamlessly with your physical invitations, showing not just key information on the day, but also a place to RSVP and post messages on an online guestbook.

If you’ve got a tech-savvy guest list, a wedding app could be an even better idea.

Services like Appy Couple allow you to easily create a wedding app with a coordinating website.

The app is free for your guests to download, enables you to take and upload photos, chat in real-time, send push notifications and even live stream, with the website having live chat and RSVP features to keep everything digital.  

Pooling memories

Unless you’ve made like a celebrity and bravely banned the use of phones or cameras at your wedding, chances are there will be thousands of pictures taken on the big day, even more if yours is a multi-day event.

To get all of these photos into one place, you can, of course, use a service like Flickr, Dropbox or even iCloud Photo Sharing.

Simply share the details with your guests and they can add all their snaps from the day.

An app created specifically for herding photos from weddings and the events that surround it is WedPics, where guests can upload from the personalised interface on the day or afterwards, be it from their phone running iOS or Android or through their website on any other device.

Alternatively, you could come up with your own wedding hashtag, and ask your guests to include it with any photos they upload to Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

This will give you an easy way of finding them later, and adding them to an online album.

Just make sure your hashtag is unique, or you might end up with pics from someone else’s special day mixed in with yours.

Whichever tech you choose to use in your planning, make sure you feel comfortable, and that it’s truly making things easier for you.

It’s meant to be fun after all!