Planning a wedding can feel like captaining a ship sometimes — there are lots of people to coordinate, lots of moving parts, and sometimes it seems like the wind is against you and there’s a storm kicking up. Before you start ordering your florist to walk the plank, it’s a good idea to get some help with your wedding planning. There are plenty of online tools and apps to help make your special day easier to put together. Here are a few of our favorites:
Guesterly
Worried about your family and friends meeting each other for the first time? Guesterly can help you pre-break the ice. You can write a questionnaire for each guest to answer, and Guesterly will take the answers electronically and use them to produce an eBook (or physical booklet) with a short bio of each guest. You can send them to all your guests or hand them out at the start of the reception, so no one has to go in completely cold.
Union Station
Finding the perfect bridesmaids dress can be a huge source of stress for a bride. There’s picking the right color, the right fit, and then either paying through the nose to outfit the whole wedding party, or feeling guilty if the dress you found is a little pricier than you planned on. That’s where Union Station comes in. You can rent your bridesmaid dresses for far cheaper than it would cost to buy them, and all the shopping’s online so it’s easy to mix and match styles for the different body types in your wedding party.
Thankster
After an exhausting wedding planning process, a raging reception, and a relaxing honeymoon, you deserve some time to set up your new married household without worrying about the little things. So let Thankster help out with your card-writing duties. You can upload a sample of your handwriting and Thankster will make a font out of it. Then you can use the font to “write” your heartfelt thanks on cards. Thankster will print, stuff, and send the cards to your guests. Hey, it beats licking a hundred envelopes.
All Seated
All Seated is a powerful planning tool for big group events (like, say, a wedding reception). You can build a floor plan of your reception space and shuffle guests around without having to write everyone’s names on index cards. Get a real sense of how many people will fit where in the space, all while you make sure your Tea Party aunt and uncle don’t get seated with your liberal hipster college buddies. This can also be incredibly useful so you know how many wedding sparklers and other wedding favors that you’ll need to buy for each place setting. Beyond the seating charts, All Seated has collaboration functionality, too, so you can share ideas with your florist, wedding planner, etc.
Partibot
Stressing over the relatives that can’t make it to the wedding? Partibot will let them attend the reception from a distance. Basically, Partibot is a two-wheeled robot that holds a tablet computer up at the eye level of your guests. Your out-of-town guest can dial into Partibot and control it from their laptop, while video chatting with the other guests at the reception. It’s pricey, but it’s really, really cool.
Before you stress about captaining the ship of your wedding, just remember that we live in the future, and put some of those tasks on autopilot.