Wedding Woes

I mentioned in a much earlier post that I am engaged to a guy I consider to be a tech genius. While I am often in awe of what he can accomplish, I also have to deal with talking him down during encounters with "poor design." We had one of these moody scenes last night.

Wedding planning can be a daunting task, and a girl needs all the help she can get. As I've been trying to get it together, I've relied on several websites to:

1. Point me in the right direction for vendors and ideas

2. Organize my information in one place

3. Keep me from crying hysterically because I am by no means an event planner

For general research I looked to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com. I also designed a very basic website on WeddingChannel and I manage my budget there as well. Of course friends and acquaintances all weighed in with advice which was very useful as well.

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to input my guest list on another site, WeddingWire.com. I think a friend may have recommended it to me, but my memory fails on this one. All I can say is that their guest tool is lacking in a few areas, and Nien made sure to point out each and every one to me last night as we tried to figure out how many invitations we have to order.

First of all, we could see total number of attendees, but not total number of parties. This was our major source of contention. I said, "Don't worry about it, I'll just go through and count." Let's just say Nien wasn't having it. He was also flummoxed because one person was listed as "no response" for both the bridal shower and rehearsal dinner. Since we haven't invited anyone to either yet, that was a little irregular and he was determined to get to the bottom of it. Trying to find individual responses to each event was a nightmare because the reports that we were able to generate wouldn't isolate the events, so a person's name appeared 3 times, once for each one. He fiddled around with it unhappily a bit longer, and we finally decided to call it a day with WeddingWire. Going forward, we'll download the master list to an Excel file and deal with it that way.

It just goes to show you that you can have a great idea capable of streamlining processes, but if you don't think about how people will use that tool you can completely miss the mark. I see now that WeddingChannel also has a guest management tool. Dare I incur further engineer snobbery by migrating the info there?