Hey, friends! Welcome back to my wedding planning blog series! I've come a long way in my planning and have some writing to do to catch you guys up, but I am going to start with a post on Save the Dates and completing a wedding website. These two kind of go hand-in-hand in some ways, so I am grouping the topics together. Happy planning!
Before I get too into info about our Save the Dates and our wedding website, you may be wondering what major items have I checked off my list so far? (8 months out, AHH!)
-Wedding date: ✅
-Wedding venue: ✅
-Wedding planner: ✅
-Photographer: ✅
-Rehearsal Dinner Venue: ✅
-Hair & Make Up Artist: ✅
-Wedding Party Proposals: ✅
-Hashtag: ✅
-Wedding Rings: ✅
-DJ: ✅
-Caterer: ✅
-Room blocks: ✅
-Florist: ✅
-Wedding Dress: ✅
-Groomsmen Attire: ✅
For vendors, I will eventually post something about which vendors I chose, how it was to work with them, etc. My wedding planner got the conversations going, but my fiancé and I are the ones that signed all of the contracts, and we paid our vendors their deposits directly. I highly recommend ordering something like this to keep all of your contracts in. I also have them saved to a folder on my desktop.
I read through each contract and highlighted all key information. We are on a payment schedule with almost all of our vendors, so I also went through and highlighted when all the payments are due. I added them to my calendar with reminders. We have a few people financially contributing to our wedding day, although we are paying for some of it ourselves. If it was an appointment for a payment someone is helping us with, I sent them the calendar appointment, too, so that they could add it to their own calendar. I even created a detailed spreadsheet keeping track of how much we've spent, how much we owe, total costs, who is paying for what, etc. Here are my fields if you want to steal this idea!
Our amazing, amazing, amazing wedding planner created a detailed budget for us, and she's helping us keep on track with it as best we can. Our planner has made our wedding planning process pretty seamless, and she is so detailed and wonderful, so I will let y'all know whom we are using now! Emily of Hill Country Bride is a STAR. I highly recommend her if you are getting married in Fredericksburg, Texas.
What will I be working on next, you ask?
-Cake
-Invitations
-Transportation
-Linens
-Decor
When the wedding gets closer and all of our RSVPs are in, I'll need to create a seating chart because we are doing a sit-down dinner. We'll need menus printed, as well as place cards. I will be working on those items in mid-January after our RSVP cut-off date!
I came up with our hashtag a while back, so I didn't need to use this, but if you're struggling and your friends can't come up with anything either, you can go to a hashtag generator website. A lot of brides are using the one linked below! The purpose of a wedding hashtag is so that you can find photos posted on social media by your guests during or after your events.
SAVE THE DATES
By the time you're ready to send your Save the Dates out, you should have a few things completed.
First - your guest list should be finished, and you should have finished collecting everyone's mailing addresses. When you're building your guest list, you can account for somewhere around 15% of the people you invite to RSVP "No." This percentage increases to 20-30% if you're having a destination wedding or inviting a lot of out-of-town guests.
Now, I did the brunt of tracking down addresses, but I did create a spreadsheet for my fiancé, and I highlighted every field that had missing info. I e-mailed it to him and asked him to get me what I needed by a certain date - this worked like magic! He came through for me!
Also, I know many people get bogged down with the majority of wedding planning and can feel isolated or like their partner isn't helping enough or contributing. I haven't had this particular problem, and I will tell you what my secret is! My fiancé and I schedule time together to go over wedding details, and we make an at-home date out of it. Most of the time, we choose a Sunday, order pizza, and we get a list of things knocked out. This is how we've been able to make wedding planning fun while also spending quality time together - this is a huge wedding planning (and life) hack! Our first day like this was to choose our wedding party, and our second one was finalizing our guest list.
Next, your wedding theme should be solidified because you'll want to choose Save the Dates that compliment your theme or at least are within the same color scheme. You should have taken your engagement photos by now (if you want to include one of the photos on the Save the Date at least)! If you can't take your photos until later for some reason, you can always include some prints from your engagement session in your wedding decor.
You should also have your wedding website complete and your registry built. This is because a few people are inevitably going to want to send you a gift once they receive your Save the Date. I actually had a few people ask me for my registry before we were even ready to send out our Save the Dates! You'll want to include the link to your wedding website on the Save the Date, which is why your website should be finished. Our link was included under "Passenger Details." In the spirit of gifts, I had actually found thank you cards on Amazon that perfectly fit a greenery theme wedding, so we already have those on hand. We've mailed a few of them out already as well for various different reasons!
My favorite thing to do is travel, and traveling with my fiancé has made my favorite thing to do that much sweeter. Our wedding is also considered a destination wedding since no one who will be attending lives in Fredericksburg. Because of this, I chose to do boarding passes for our Save the Dates. I ordered these through Etsy from Paperedia. You'll want to purchase a generic, pre-printed physical sample for $2 before you place your actual order - this is just to check the color and quality. The color is more of a sage green in person than what you are seeing in the pictures.
If you like the sample, proceed with ordering! I loved the sample and ended up ordering 105 prints from this shop. I have several left over, but I didn't have the exact number we needed before I ordered them. I did order colored envelopes as well. Because your guest list should be nearly finalized, you should know around how many Save the Dates you need to mail out. I would highly recommend ordering at least 10 extras, especially if you plan to address the envelopes yourselves.
When you're ordering these, she'll need the style, name of couple, date, wedding destination, wedding website, and additional info for the back. I sent my photo to her in an e-mail, and she sent me a digital proof the next day, which I had to approve before they were printed. Paperedia was so easy to work with, and I loved our Save the Dates! We got so many compliments on the uniqueness of them.
Onto our envelopes! If you remember, our wedding theme is a greenery wedding. I imagine there will be a lot of white roses. Because of this, I ordered stamps with white roses on them. Linked below! These are forever stamps, so you just need one stamp if your envelope is under an ounce.
I ended up addressing our envelopes myself. I did one, and once I had it perfect, I created the rest of them and printed them at home. I printed a few test envelopes as well to make sure the placement looked good! I have a Mac, so I used Pages, and the font I used is Snell Roundhand (black - bold - 20 pt).
I'd ordered a custom return address stamp and Save the Date wax seals from Etsy. The custom stamp is from StampedWithLoveXOXO, and I ordered the wood stamp + ink pad - rectangle. Our address is also on there under "Soon to Be Mr. and Mrs. Cantu," but I redacted it for purposes of this post. They also sent me a digital proof that I made one tweak to before approving. This couple was so kind and fun to work with!
For the wax seal stickers, I ordered 150 pieces, in antique yellow gold, 3 cm, design number 21 (Save the Date) from LaradesignCrafts . These come as stickers, so you just peel the paper off the back and add it to your envelope! Such an amazing finish to your Save the Dates!
I am in two brides groups on Facebook, and another bride posted this graphic to help determine when your Save the Dates and invitations should be sent out based on your wedding month. I found this to be so helpful - we ended up mailing our Save the Dates in mid-June for a March wedding, but our invitations will be going out at the beginning of November (before the craziness of the holidays sets in)! I bet your friends and family can't wait to get your snail mail!
WEDDING WEBSITE
There are so many different sites that you can create a wedding website on, for free at that! - Zola, the Knot, Wedding Wire, Minted - just to name a few. I ended up going with Zola, and I did so for a few reasons. The ones I can name off the top of my head are that you can register directly through Zola. For your registry, you can choose when gifts ship to you, you can keep track of whether you sent a thank you card yet, you can exchange gifts before they ship if you want to, and you can set up cash funds that multiple people can contribute to. Your registry automatically integrates with your wedding website and shows up as one of your tabs. After your wedding, the remaining items on your registry will also be 20% off for you for six months!
You can order your Save the Dates, invitations, and signage directly though Zola if you want to! You can password protect your site if you choose to do so. You can use a contact collector that's a link you can text to your guests. You can keep track of your guest list, as well as who is invited to which event. You can keep track of RSVPs and meal choices through Zola as well. You can export so much of this information into an Excel spreadsheet. You can also create your seating chart through Zola.
I also frequently get emails from Zola asking if I need help with anything or letting me know what I should be doing. You can also search for local vendors through their site. Basically - anything you can think of, you can do through Zola! It's extremely user-friendly.
You can keep your wedding website hidden until your ready to publish it for your guests to view, so you can take your sweet, sweet time editing it - which is exactly what I did! This allowed me to create such a thorough site for our guests.
I chose one of the designs Zola offered that compliments our wedding theme, and I started writing bit by bit. The first tab we have is Home, which includes our names, hashtag, wedding date and city, a countdown, a blurb about how we met, a blurb about our journey, and a blurb about our proposal. I used our engagement photos all over our website, so I was very glad we already had them back!
Our next tab is our schedule, which includes the dates, times, and addresses for our rehearsal dinner and for our wedding. You can choose to hide events from all guests, so they'll just be visible for the guests invited. Typically, your rehearsal dinner is on a smaller scale and will be a more intimate event, so you may not want all of your guests to know the details of it for example.
For our travel tab, we listed the two closest airports to our venue and information about our two room blocks. I also listed and linked other vacation rentals in the area I have been following on Instagram for a while.
Our registry tab is next, and it's pretty easy to add items if you're registering directly through Zola. My fiancé and I have been living together for three years and we own a home together, so we have tons of stuff. Recently, we have started valuing memories and time together more than material items. For Christmas last year, we planned a weekend getaway to Hot Springs National Park instead of buying each other gifts. We included some items on our registry because older generations will want to buy you a physical gift, and that's okay! I did write a blurb about how we don't need a material gift. Check it out!
Our Wedding Party tab is up next, and this one is self-explanatory - you introduce your wedding party!
I included a picture of my sister or girl friend and me and wrote a small blurb about how we met or why we're friends. Here's an example of one of them that I did!
For Alex's section, I just included the name and a picture of his guy friend and him - he didn't want to write anything.
For our gallery, I just included some pictures of Alex and me at key moments in our relationship - attending other weddings, on our travels, things like that. I also made a video with photos from our relationship that's a YouTube link I was able to embed on this page. The video may have been overkill, but I love it!
The Things to Do tab is next, and this one is one of the ones I probably spent the most time on. Fredericksburg is lovely, and there are a lot of spots I wanted to include. Some of my faves that you can find on that page are - Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, Fat Ass Ranch & Winery, Signor Vineyards, Martinis Seafood House, Chase's Place Kitchen + Cocktails, Caliche Coffee Bar & Roastery, and Das Peach Haus.
Our FAQs page is probably the most important page on our website! Here our guests can find information about whether they can bring their kids, parking, when they should RSVP by, what they should wear, etc. Zola gave me some suggestions about what to include here. It reads in a question / answer format.
I chose our RSVP date based on when our venue needs a final head count. I took that date and walked it back two weeks to allow for a cushion. That's the first FAQ you'll find. I included our dress code next - we don't expect our guests to dress overly fancy, but we don't really want jeans at our wedding either. I wrote - Question: "Is there a dress code?" / Answer: "Yes, there is a dress code! Please wear cocktail attire. Full-length gowns are not necessary, and jeans are discouraged." Another FAQ I included was that people should arrive 20-30 minutes before the ceremony start time to ensure they're seated at the start of the ceremony.
This next FAQ is highly debated. Couples are leaning away from inviting kids to weddings. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that you typically pay per person at weddings these days. Kids don't really remember being there, and it gives parents a night off to celebrate with their friends/family. This does mean some people won't be able to come to your wedding, which is totally understandable! I wrote our FAQ out like this:
Other FAQs I included were along the lines of:
-Can I bring a date?
-Are you registered? Where?
-I have a food allergy. Can I make a special request?
-Is there parking for the ceremony/reception?
-Is there transportation to and from the hotels to the ceremony? We are still working out the details for this one, so I put we are working out the details of this with our wedding planner, so check back for more details at a later time!
-Can I photograph or video the wedding ceremony? I will include my response to this one!
-Will the wedding be indoors or outdoors?
-Can I post pictures and videos from the wedding on social media? In our answer, I just requested people use our hashtag when they do so.
Our RSVPs tab is last , and it just looks like this!
Happy Planning, everyone! Feel free to send me an e-mail at catherine@biteshikesandotherlikes.com if you have any questions about any of my wedding planning process! I'd love to connect with you!