Just starting.. best websites?

jesso22

Hi, just wondering what are the best websites for planning weddings, suppliers, venues, advice etc. Already use Pinterest
There's a lot that pops up on Google, but not much in them when I click.

vintagecosmos

Onefabday.com was great for me.

gracemarie

If you’re on Facebook, there’s a group called Help I’m getting married Ireland that’s great for advice from other brides and suppliers also. It’s linked with Weddingsonline

baby and crumble

One fab day was where we got most of our info really. Also try and find out about as many of the wedding fairs as you can and go along, especially the smaller or more quirky ones, you’ll find smaller vendors who are fab just not as big as the ones who can pay the fees for the big fairs. Honestly once you follow a few FB pages your algorithms will start picking up wedding stuff and you’ll see adds. We found our amazing videographer that way.

convert

Those sites are helpful, but I found that there's a lot of information on the 'extras' that are necessary to make your day, such as the extra decorations/flowers/signs needed for the ceremony venue to the advice to have a pick'n'mix stall, an ice-cream cart, a photo booth, etc. for the guests, or even an entertainer to go around during the reception/dinner to keep people entertained.

And even looking at their 'wedding costs' case studies made my stomach churn. There were only a handful below a €20,000 budget on the site, which was still over our budget!

But if you think about what you want on the day, what's most important to you, and focus on that, and then have a list of 'maybes', it will really help. There were things that we thought we'd like initially, but decided against in the end, either because we felt they wouldn't work with what we had, or because it was too much work!

baby and crumble

That's a good point, you can get sucked in to the whole "you have to have this" thing for a while, especially if you read too many blogs and sites.

We had a joint shared planning spreadsheet (yes, i know, but hey it worked for us!) and on one tab we basically had a list of all the things you can get for a wedding. Going from like, wedding cars to candy carts, etc. We included toasts, speeches, videographer all that. Then we each went through the list and put a 1 if we REALLY wanted it, a 2 if we were like "well I don't really mind" and a 3 if we hated the idea.

We soon realised that there were certain things we both agreed on, in particular in the "dear god no" category that we thought the other wanted lol. That also helped us prioritise our budget. We made the most of our money and because we got rid of loads of little things that actually, nobody carers about in the long run (like candy carts, things in the bathroom, all that) we could go to town on stuff we cared about which had a bigger impact on the day overall - like getting the photographer and videographer we wanted even though they were not the cheapest options. I won't ever regret that.

Edit: it reads there a bit like I'm crapping on folks who have a candy cart, I'm 100% not. There's bits of our wedding that I know other folks would be like "eh, the ****?" so it was just an example.