Well, it could have been really easy and simple. We didn't have to do one. I mean, how complicated did this wedding stuff need to get?!
But no, we chose the complicated and windy path. The road that included multiple treks to Macys, hours of browsing on Amazon, numerous emails spent tracking down bridal party members, etc. Was it necessary? Not at all! Many couples choose not to have a save the date and regardless, the right guests show up on the right day at the right venue. Easy peasy. So why did we create one if we didn't to?
I honestly don't know. For me, there's no "whys" in weddings. There's only "why the heck not?"
So...why the heck not:
Sent to everyone as a PDF, converted to a JPG here.
Let's start from the beginning. Our STDs (insert giggle) had a few components. I didn't want the actual file to be cluttered with a lot of info, so creating multiple external links to all the extraneous information kept it neat and tidy. The first thing I did was create a wedding website using one of the templates from Project Wedding. I chose PW because not only did it come highly recommended from my BM N, but also b/c the format seemed clean and easy to use. The daunting part was filling it up with interesting and useful information. I started this process in October, and it wasn't until an hour before we sent out the PDF above that we finally got the last bits of information to complete the website.
We worked the hardest on our bridal party section and after all that drama, it was worth it. We've gotten many compliments on how funny and personal the stories were, and I'm really happy that people have taken the time to read them. I always love to read other people's websites and their stories (yes, I'm a website stalker and I admit it!) and it was nice to pay it forward.
Another section that required some outside work was securing hotel blocks for our guests. Jerry was in charge of this and I think he did a very thorough and excellent job. Because a good percentage of our potential guests are from out of town (Bay Area, Canada, Germany), we wanted to make sure they had a comfortable and accessible place to stay. I'll write about that in another post!
The last major piece of our website was our registry. That, my friends, was quite the learning experience. And deserves its own post...or two.
The second thing I did on a whim was create a formspring.me account. Totally not necessary. But why the heck not. That process took almost no time. Ask away if you're bored!
The third section I worked on was our Google Form to automatically get contact information. I know I took the tedious route in to do our save the dates, but that didn't mean that I couldn't find an easy way out to obtain contact information instead of asking every. single. person. what their address was! :P What's so great about this is that after people fill out the form, it goes directly to a spreadsheet in your google documents. From that spreadsheet we can export it to Excel and later create labels. THANK YOU GOOGLE. You can find tutorials everywhere or even walk yourself through it, but I used this tutorial. Since the regular link to our completed form was a super long mumble jumble mess, I used the tinyurl program to shorten it. I liked that you could personalize part of the URL!
That's a lot typing. Thanks for reading- there's an ending to this story!
3 comments:
I didn't realize it's so complicated to have a save a date.
It doesn't have to be, Thu! We just decided to be extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemely thorough. I've received much more concise and simple STDs on the past and the message gets across regardless. So just personalize it to what you want. Jerry and I apparently want to be complicated. :P
You put a lot of effort into these projects and it shows. I appreciate how everything people need or want to know is already available at their fingertips!
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