The Wonders of Google Docs

I honestly don't know how people planned weddings before computers.  Mail merge, budget calculators, online shopping, and galleries full of inspiration photos -- I would be lost without them.

One tool that has proved invaluable while B and I have been apart is Google Docs.  I have a serious spreadsheet addiction (probably stemming from the nature of my job) and there are countless documents on my computer devoted to the wedding.  Budgets, checklists, guest lists (yes, all plural - I have more than one version of each), the list goes on and on.  B, on the other hand, doesn't even have Excel on his computer (how does he survive??!).  But with Google Docs, that doesn't matter.  We can share access to all of these files, and each or us are able to edit them without emailing the altered drafts back and forth to one another.  Like I said, invaluable in a long-distance relationship!

But my favorite feature by FAR is the live updates. Both of us can view a document at the same time, and whenever either one of us highlights a cell or makes a change, the other sees it in real time.  (The first time this happened my jaw hit the floor).  I know it sounds cheesy, but it made me feel like he was right there in the room with me and we were planning our wedding together like a normal couple!

The Sincerest Form of Flattery?

Remember when I told you about our wedding website?  About all the time I spent, looking for the perfect platform to use?  How proud I was of all the resources available for our guests that I'd written out, rewritten, and tweaked until the result was perfect?

Well apparently someone else thought it was perfect too.

A high school classmate of B's got engaged this past summer, and will be getting married in July.  We recently received their Save the Date, which included a link to their wedding website, so I went online to check it out, excited to learn more about their big day.  The more I saw, the angrier I became.  It was clear to me almost at once that she had used our site as a rubric for her own.  On the surface, that fact doesn't bother me.  It is a testament to the awesomeness of our site, right?  However, the extent of the copying was astonishing.

Let's take a look at the evidence, shall we?

Wedding Websites 411

Let's review our engagement timeline, shall we?

January 1, 2005 - Started Dating
November 21, 2009 - Got Engaged
July 28, 2010 - GOT A WEDDING DATE

Okay, so that's over eight months of engagement before we had a date, before we could book vendors, and before we could actually have a conversation about the wedding without getting into the Dickens of back stories whenever anyone asked when we were getting married.

I've already discussed how difficult that period was, but now let's focus on the positives.  Sure, there were a lot of things that hinged on the date, but there was plenty of fun things I could do in the meantime.  I could research vendors, contemplate our wedding colors, peruse my favorite wedding inspiration sites, but one task proved much more satisfying than anything else I accomplished over those eight long months: the wedding website.

I knew almost immediately after getting engaged that I wanted we needed one.  I spent more time than I would care to admit putting her together, but I was so happy with the results, and once she was finally finished I really felt like I had accomplished something!

So here's the breakdown of my quest for the perfect website: