A Geek Getting Married

In just under 200 days, I will be getting married to the girl of my dreams. For most people, this is a big enough event as is, but as a geek, I’ve been looking for ways to get my own personal touch into the wedding as much as possible. Having technology involved with your big day not only makes the planning a bit more fun for us geeks, but it can really enhance the wedding experience and save you money.

One of the best services online that Allison actually introduced me to is The Knot. This website is free and gives you plenty of tips about timelines, venue choices and pretty much anything else you can imagine that is wedding related. Guys take note though, this site is incredibly popular and your girlfriend probably already knows about it, so when you decide to pop the question, don’t be surprised when she already has an account.

In conjunction with The Knot, it is a great idea to keep notes about all the things that you find related to the wedding. I have been using Evernote on my iPhone to keep track of everything from bills to ideas for centre pieces. Not only does this win you points for being involved with the planning, it can save you a lot of stress when you have to try and remember everything you have been looking at and planning.  Simply snap a picture, or record a voice note when you have an idea and save it to a notebook. To be even more efficient, save it to a notebook that is shared with your partner so they can see everything you’re thinking of too.

Since much of Allison’s family comes from the east coast of Canada, it means that there will be many people that will not be able to make the wedding, and unfortunately this also means that her grandparents will not be able to come. Not wanting them to miss this important day, we have decided to stream our wedding online.

There has already been a growing trend in weddings to hire a videographer as well as a photographer, but it is really easy to stream your wedding for free. All you need is a computer, a webcam and an internet connection. There are some great services like Justin.TV and UStream that provide free accounts and then all you have to do is either embed the link in your wedding website, or email the link to those who can’t make it.

The biggest boon I have found with technology in the wedding though is invitations. While I was not able to convince my fiancée to go all digital, I was able to convince her to do the RSVPs through Wufoo. Wufoo is a service that will help you make forms to place on your website for free. Before I discuss too much about Wufoo, I should let everyone know that the best thing they can do to help with the wedding is make a quick and easy wedding website.  It is a great way to share all of the information with your guests and it can be a fun experience to build one as a couple. Even if you’re like me and not a web programmer at all there are many great tools for building a wedding website like iWeb and WordPress.

The great benefit for me with Wufoo was the ability to have it automatically send me an email once my guests have filled out their RSVP and it sorts directly into a folder for the wedding based on the rules in my inbox. Not only does this save you from printing off countless cards for your guests to fill out, but it also saves you quite a bit on postage.  Adding the form to a website is easy too since Wufoo gives you all the code you need to cut and paste it to your website.

These are just a few tips about how technology can help your wedding go as smoothly as possible. While there are many ways to incorporate technology into your wedding, just remember to not go overboard. You don’t want to always be remembered as the guy who had to reboot his server in the middle of his vows. I’d love to hear other people’s suggestions as to what they have done or are going to do so make sure you leave a comment below.