I've got married almost 3 years ago and didn't do anything apart from getting a company to do my party. No fb groups or anything, no regrets, it was perfect.
We also wrote a lot of stuff offline and talked about how we wanted it, but all the planning software and so on that exists makes me think that people are doing a lot of useless stuff.
We didn't even film it, had a photo session where like 2-3 pictures in the end we cared about. There's a lot of bullshit in the industry and it all makes it either more expensive or less special.
My mother and father filmed it, I believe that they've watched it like twice and whenever they tried to show me I just slept, it's boring as fuck and it's only very emotional, nice and cool when you are actually in the moment, at the time, with yourself. All the rest is just bullshit, it's about showing people on fb that you are married and so on, which is something I don't feel so comfortable to share because it's very personal.
I bet couples and people are different, but if I had to bikeshed even the color of the plants on the table or my wife did, it probably meant that we don't like each other that much. We just enjoyed the time and had a very nice moment together, from when we decided to marry, to the party and after.
Now as I'm getting older, I'm having my younger friends getting married and asking me this kind of stuff, but when I really dig them, some of them are getting married just so they don't split up... really... dunno. Hard to say.
- https://www.greenvelope.com - we wanted to get the word out fast so we used electronic save the dates and wedding invitations
- PayPal - different vendors accepted different payment methods so we used PayPal to manage most of it
- Google Spreadsheets - we listed out table seating, meal options, gifts and more and shared with our wedding planner and other family members
- https://soundwaveprosdj.com - this is our DJ's site which allowed us to find and select specific songs. For example, I selected a string quartet version of Guns and Roses Sweet Child of Mine when walking down the isle
- Yelp - that's how we found our wedding planner and my tuxedo shop
- YouTube - we live-streamed our wedding ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6p9OA33E8M
- Marriott - we did a wedding room block at the Marriott but in order for guests to book a room online, they sent us a link where the dates and pricing were exposed in plain-text as query string parameters. Sure enough if you changed one of these param values, the web page would show it!
In addition, also advertising has a lot of potential, it's very heavily under utilized, and it's pretty easy to predict. So if you build a great product, it should be very cheap to bring it in front of many people.
Never use unproven tech for a mission critical deliverable :)
social media is a big part of the wedding experience today too. People will criticize it in that it takes people out of the present, but it does let people share and memorialize the experience.