Do a quick search on “wedding software” and you’ll be inundated with lots of pink websites with the inevitable script font, featuring fuzzy photos of couples gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. I don’t know about you, but that certainly makes me want to Lose My Loving Feeling.

So if you’re looking to depuff-ify and depink-ify your wedding planning efforts but could still use a little process and assistance along the way, here’s some ideas about how you might be able to put a couple of software and web apps to use for your wedding planning purposes…

Numbers and People
Your local friendly MS Excel spreadsheet is a versatile creature - it can keep track of your budget and help with all kinds of number-crunching, as well as sorting your attendees, and tracking who’s on your A List or B List, who’s coming and who’s not, and do that crazy mail merge thing so that you can make nice sticky labels too. Google spreadsheets (perhaps a little too invasive, but ah, so loveable! so shareable! so omnipresent!) would do the trick as well. Once that part’s all lined up, plot out who will sit next to whom without throttling each other with Simpleseating.

Dates and Ideas
Use Y! calendar or again, Google’s version. Since Google just keeps shouting look at me!me!me!, there’s also their notebook which could come in handy for keeping track of different ideas and images you stumble across. If you’ve got a hate on for Google, maybe Zoho will do it for you. Store and share all your files, notes, and photos with the free (”Basic” with 1 GB storage space) Box.net account. If you’re just into links, then use one of the many social bookmarking sites, like del.icio.us or blinklist. If you’ve always wanted to be a Project Manager, bluetie or the freebie version of basecamp
will make your heart sing.

Ah, then there’s the personal wiki, throw a dart and take your pick, if you’re into wikifying things. If the inner social scientist demands a survey of some sort, you can always Survey Monkey food, menu, location, venue preferences…pare it down to 10 essential questions and it’s free.

If you love a list, then go crazy with Ta-da Lists or the so-cutely-named Remember the Milk. HiTask is good for extreme ‘task management’ (code for list-making maniacs, uhm, like myself).

Invites
Don’t want to kill trees but still need a headcount? I suppose you could always use evite or sendomatic, or you could do the slightly more geeky Wufoo, here’s an example of a wedding invite. If you’re doing the destination wedding thing, organizing all the details might be less of a pain in the ass with Triphub. If snail mail is a necessity, but you dread the trip to the post office, Postful might just be the thing for you.

Registry
Covet stuff? Beyond the offerings provided by retailers, there’s many places for you to wish and list away: felicite, myGiftList, whattogive.com, wishrepublic…or go the charitable route with IDoFoundation or JustGive. If you’re a friend or family member taking up a collection, then chipin or fundable might make the job easier.

Mash It Up
Of course, no geek-talk is complete without talking about one of those supertrendy Google Maps mash-ups, but this one is with a wedding twist: Wedding Mapper or perhaps Wayfaring with none of that wedding rah-rah about it. Link to it from your electronic (or paper) invite.

And if you do decide to delve into the pinkness, here’s some software to get your started:
iDo
My Wedding Companion
Wedding Tracker
Smart Wedding
My Wedding Organizer
Weddings a Breeze

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.