I love an outdoor wedding. Heck, I had one myself! In fact, I never once considered having it indoors. Thing is, though, that there are aspects of having an outdoor ceremony and reception that might not jump out at you the instant you have the idea. Don’t panic, though. I’m here to give you some tips to make the whole thing run smoothly.

1. Have a backup plan. Weather is unpredictable. Even in areas where it’s relatively predictable, the unexpected happens. Whether your worry is rain, wind, or lightning, have a way to hold the wedding if the weather doesn’t want to co-operate. The most important thing is that you get married. Getting married where you really want to is the icing on the wedding cake.
(more…)

Once upon a time, the bride and the groom might have their own wedding website if they were web designers, wanted to cough up the dough to have someone design a wedding website for them, or they were content to muck about with a free website that wasn’t wedding-themed, but got the job done. Then came the low-cost customized wedding websites and the free (but still pretty good) wedding websites, and it wasn’t long before having a wedding website wasn’t a novelty, but something every bride and groom ought to do if they love their guests even a little bit.

Full disclosure: I made a wedding website for myself and The Beard, and I wish I could link to it but it’s nowhere to be found. We tossed up a few pics, our non-registry info, directions, and info about hotels, and then we made up a very silly how-we-met story that had people raising their eyebrows. We did not post pictures of ourselves from infancy or give lengthy bios of our wedding party or way too much personal information a la those wacky Christmas letters that let one and all know that Jimmy won his school spelling bee championship!

Would Double X’s Noreen Malone have approved of our wedding website? Doubtful, considering she simply cannot stand the things.

My roommate and I spent a solid hour on the couch one evening discussing a wedding Web site we’d been sent. The people getting married were strangers, but that didn’t stop me from forwarding it to a friend or two I thought might get a kick out of it. In the months preceding their marriage you can watch the Flash slide show that explains how [Jane and Tim] met while rooting for opposing teams during a Yankees-Red Sox game as many times as you want. But that’s only if you tire of the video showing Jane and Tim lovingly washing their dog, Mr. Snuffles.

Jane and Tim have chosen to color their special story various shades of soft green, with tan accents of faux ribbons, shadowed floral flourishes, and a highly stylized fake script font. The vibe is perhaps meant to be “classy,” but it’s very hard to achieve an understated aesthetic when the message you most want to telegraph is LOOK AT ME. The main page features a black-and-white shot of Tim adoring Jane while she reciprocates with the upturned chin angle that telegraphs true, moony love, taken during the couple’s (extensive) engagement photo shoot. Visitors can choose one of several unrecognizable soft-rock songs while they browse (but no mute button option). There are a grand total of 651 pictures featured—from baby photos to Solo-cup-filled college dorm-room shots to shots of their four—count ‘em—engagement parties.

Instead of being tasteful, utilitarian affairs, these sites inevitably turn into showcases for unbridled narcissism—and open the couple up to a great deal of mockery from friends and strangers alike.

Do you agree? Have you created your own wedding website or paid someone to create it for you? As for my opinion, I think they can be a tad annoying when overdone — autoplay music doesn’t belong anywhere, and I do hope that if I’m attending your wedding I at least have some notion of how you and your intended met — and there are plenty of other ways to find out where a venue is… hello, Google Maps! Still, if your wedding website sucks (which I’m sure none of yours do, natch) then all I have to do is close Firefox and never visit your URL again.

We get a lot of press releases here at Manolo for the Brides. I mean A LOT of press releases, which is why my inbox is always getting wicked backed up and I am way tardy in answering some reader e-mails. Some of the press releases I receive are appropriately wedding related, while others are kind of pushing the wedding angle just because, hey, weddings are a cash cow.

For example, I just received a release informing me that Microsoft Office Live offers “free online tools that can help a bride get organized and stay connected to family and friends during the planning process.” These include a wedding web site, a place to upload wedding details to share with vendors and venues, and a repository for ideas. That’s useful enough, I guess, but what interested me was the justification for needing to use Microsoft Office Live versus, say, Blogger or one of the upteenbillion other free site hosting services.

A new trend that’s emerging is brides who are sharing their wedding details with their bridal party via social networking sites. Sharon Naylor, wedding expert and author of 35 wedding books, says this is not only inefficient, but it ruins the surprise element for guests who have read endless status updates about the coral dresses, the catering plans, etc.

Now I don’t know about you, but I was eager to share my wedding deets with anyone willing to humor me for five minutes to two hours. My wedding gown? It’s gold! My reception venue? My gram’s backyard in Merritt Island, FL! I’d spill the beans about anything and everything because I was proud of my choices. By the time the wedding rolled around, the only thing that was even remotely a secret was my dress, and it was only a secret from The Beard. It never even struck me to want to spring my wedding color scheme or my wedding shoes on unsuspecting guests.

Am I alone in this? You tell me!

(img via — check it out for a different kind of wedding surprise!)

Um…

youbuyMYWEDDING offers a unique service where you can invite your wedding guests to help by paying money for your wedding day expenses instead of buying items from a more traditional gift list – which helps you to have a wedding you can afford and also to avoid starting married life in debt.

Ahahaha, this is a joke site, right? With a name like youbuyMYWEDDING, it has to be satire… Or not. Brides and grooms are supposedly getting older and older, which means that everyone you know who’s getting married probably already has a toaster oven and a spatula set. What they might not have is $30,000 to pay for what is now considered a moderately-priced wedding.

Don’t you just love it when entrepreneurs come up with shady solutions to problems that aren’t really problems*? As you can see, brides and grooms in the UK (who are willing to let 4.75% of their gifts go to administrative costs) can ask their loved ones to contribute to their weddings by paying for things like the wedding gown, the bridesmaids’ bouquets, or the very champagne they’ll drink at the wedding reception. It’s just like a honeymoon registry in almost every respect, except that it’ll make everyone on your guest list look at you a bit funny.

On the surface it sounds very practical and modern and even a little progressive in these woeful economic times, but lordy, it’s not at all in keeping with good etiquette. Were I to receive an invitation to a wedding that I was being asked to pay for, I would give the bride and groom the gift of an RSVP card reading “Declines With Regrets.” That’s just as good as ponying up some cash for the cash bar, after all, because the couple then has one less mouth to feed!

*Don’t have a ton of money to spend on your wedding? Budget wedding tips abound here and elsewhere on the Internet!

I have to ask: Have you seen The Plunge? Yet another wedding planning site for grooms has emerged, and this one is pretty flashy compared to its peers. Unlike most wedding sites geared toward dudes, this one has actual written content that goes beyond a hundred incarnations of “Stand back, and shut up.” Then again, a lot of that content reads like this:

There’s a new piece of furniture in your bedroom: a stack of magazines, books, and articles that could double as a side-table. It’s your fiancée’s “wedding porn.” And unlike actual porn, this isn’t harmless. It’s putting ideas in her head. Poisonous ideas. Thoughts about how you, as a groom, should be “behaving.” This is where it gets dangerous.

A few things irk me about this snippet from one of The Plunge’s intro pages. First, I don’t buy into the idea that the WIC can turn regular chicks into screaming harpies. A true bridezilla was probably already kind of a bitch, and no magazine or book is going to turn a regular chick into a bitch. Second, it stands to reason that there are behavioral (and dress and etiquette) guidelines for weddings, the same way there are behavior guidelines for any party. It’s a formal function, jeez. If it’s mantime to complain about wedding planning, can we at least get some fresh and original complaints?

(more…)

• As I write this, I’m engaged in helping a friend plan her upcoming wedding. My job, simply put, is to find inspiration — links to wedding gowns for tall girls, pictures of backyard barbecue receptions that are rustic chic, and everything else related to nuptials. In fulfilling my responsibilities, I came across Emmaline Bride, which is more of a portal than an actual shop.
  

  Whether you’re looking for bridal accessories, wedding shoes, stationery, or your “something blue,” there are links to featured Etsy sellers who can provide you with exactly what you want. Well, sometimes. Currently, Emmaline Bride is suffering from a noticeable lack of links in certain categories. I’m hoping that spreading the word will encourage Etsy sellers who cater to brides and their bridesmaids to get on board because it’s such a clever idea.

• It’s no secret that I love answering reader questions — so keep sending them my way whether you want me to post them or not — but I’m not the only one! If you have a question about shopping for wedding gowns or there’s something you’ve always wanted to know about the inner workings of Kleinfeld (featured on TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress

) you can call 888-593-7377 (that’s 888-59-DRESS) to leave your questions for Randy, Kleinfeld’s Fashion Director, and Nicole, Director of Sales.

 They’ll answer your questions via audio responses that will appear on TLC’s web site.

I’ve been a bridesmaid three times. Four, if you count the time I was nabbed at literally a minutes’ notice to attend the bride in a spur-of-the-moment vow reaffirmation in the middle of an historical re-enactment.

Back when I was doing this, the job was pretty easy. Basically, it consisted of: showing up on time to wedding-related functions, paying for and wearing the outfit the bride chose without complaint, smiling on the big day, and reassuring the bride after her return from the honeymoon that the wedding had been lovely whether it was or not. If the bride had any little projects that needed doing, she might or might not ask for help with them, but you were free to say you hadn’t the time or really stank at what she’d asked, but would be willing to help out with another aspect. The MOH had the additional requirements of holding any shower or bachelorette bash (usually one or the other, and usually pretty low-key), and witnessing the marriage license.

These days, one keeps hearing more and more about brides who expect more and more of their bridesmaids. So I decided to use my Google Fu and see what’s expected of a bridesmaid these days.

(more…)