Customized Wedding Websites

One of the most challenging aspects of a destination wedding is keeping your guests informed of the planning of your wedding. To keep everyone up to date, we recommend developing a small wedding website.

Thankfully, there are number of vendors that provide easy-to-use website systems for reasonable prices (less than $75 for a year). If you can write an e-mail, you can do a website with these companies. Some good vendors are:

• Wedquarters (we used them; they can also burn it onto CD later for a keepsake)
• Celebrate Our Lives Wedding Websites (www.celebrateourlives.com)
• Wedding Witness (www.weddingwitness.com)
  

On your wedding website, you can tell your guests important details of your wedding including:

• Travel information
• Hotel booking
• Photos of venue
• Ideas of other activities in the area (golf, scuba diving, sightseeing, etc.)
• Engagement photos
• Links to registries
  

Now, many people use blogs for this purpose. However, your guests don’t care about all the details and don’t want to sort through the blog chronologically. These websites make it much easier to present the information topically.

Do your guests a favor and make a website!

Covering the basics – Hiring a local wedding planner

Planning a wedding, especially a destination wedding, can be very difficult. Usually, you are not familiar with the location and local vendors, so having someone to assist can make a world of difference!

By wedding planner, we don’t mean a wedding vendor or tour operators—these folks usually just package hotels, airfare, and ground transit. We mean a true wedding planner who will help with flowers, cakes, logistics, negotiating and securing contracts with hotels, arranging music and handling all your needs.

Some hotels and resorts have their own on-site planners, some don’t. In general, we found these on-site planners to be only moderately helpful. They were responsive to get you to sign a contract, but not helpful to answer your detailed questions. We started to feel like just a number—something we definitely didn’t want for our special day.

We quickly learned that there are a number of independent destination wedding planners in several locations. These folks are local and know the good, the bad and the ugly about local vendors. Since they are not affiliated with the hotel/resort directly, they have more freedom in recommending good vendors, not just the ones that have contracts with the resort.

We also learned that finding these independent wedding planners is a bit of a needle in a haystack. We found our planner, And the Two Become One in the Bahamas, through a review that someone had posted in the Knot Bios. Seeking out reviews or friends who have utilized their services can be very helpful.

To get an idea of all of the things that an independent wedding planner can do for you, check out the website for Ceremonies of St. John. They help with everything from coordinating the marriage license to making sure the color on the cake is right.