Welcome to our video series of the top 20 questions brides ask when planning their wedding.  One of the questions I regularly get is “Where can I get some great wedding planning tools? ”

Read along with the text below:

Let me say:  I feel your frustration!  I am always looking for great wedding planning tools to recommend to the brides who visit our wedding blogs, and they are hard to find.  Many of the big, corporate style wedding websites have checklists or online software, but a lot of it is, well, lame.  There ARE some good ones out there, but they have all kinds of selling of product built into them.  Many people use these checklists, but there is no personal touch with the wedding planning.  There is the program, and you get to use it after logging in.  If you have questions about your wedding plan, you have to find the answers yourself.

There are many wedding planning books, and if you visit your local bookstore, you will find that all of them are different.  I purchase a few new ones every year, and I must say I am often disappointed.  It seems that each book excels in certain areas with a certain type of information—so you will need to look at these books to see what is in them, and whether it is the kind of information you are looking for.

Then there are wedding planning checklists.  If you’ve done a google search for wedding planning checklists, you will see there are many—and again they cover certain things, but not all things.  For example, the timeline is usually covered, but what about questions to ask the caterer, or a nice checklist to make sure all your reception tasks are taken care of?  Those are harder to find.  Some books have some of this type of information, but I have yet to see one that has all of this information.

Then there are wedding planning software solutions.  These are usually quite in depth and have many linked databases to make some of your tasks easier—mostly in calculating number of guests, calculating budgets based on percentages, etc.  Some even let you design your reception site by letting you put in the size of the room, the number of tables, colour of napkins, etc.  I was very excited by that one when I first got it, but after 2 hrs, I couldn’t get tables, arches, and other things placed into the program properly, and I gave up.

We saw a real need in the wedding market that was not being met by the existing wedding planning tools, and that is why we created an online wedding planning membership site.  Between the video modules explaining everything you need to know about every step of the wedding planning process, to customizable SmartBride Action Plans (our version of the checklists), interviews with the experts like caterers, photographers, etc., and, of course, our own certified wedding planning consultants who are available every day to answer your wedding planning questions, we feel we have create the perfect wedding planning tool.

Everyone’s needs are different, and some couples who are planning a simple wedding might find some of these tools adequate—-and other will not.  If you find any great wedding planning tools out there, feel free to drop us a line and we’ll pass it on to our blog readers.

Good luck, and congratulations on your upcoming wedding.