Remember mywedding.com? They were the offbeat monthly sponsor last August, and they've got a couple new features that y'all should know about:

1. Wedding invitations that match your website!
This is a feature that's really starting to take off on the web, and with good reason. It's nice to do one-stop visual aesthetic shopping, and mywedding.com's got a great selection of non-froof designs for both web and invites.

2. Social network wedding registry!
Mywedding.com partnered with a Seattle start-up called Wishpot, which allows you to create a wedding registry that goes across stores all across the web. You can add items from any online retailer — and yes, that includes Etsy! Then, your Wishpot registry displays automagically on your mywedding.com free wedsite. (Here's more about how Wishpot works.)

Head on over to mywedding.com and get started today on your free wedding website — and get in on some matching invites and cross-store gift registry.

Congrats to Amber Kuhn for winning the set of li'l matching iPods in the recent mywedding.com/offbeat bride contest. She provided suggestions for her perfect wedding planning playlist, based on three themes:

Idealism — Adam Sandler's "Grow Old With You"
How the heck are we going to pay for this? — Queen's "Under Pressure"
Maybe we should just elope — James Taylor's "Mexico"

A few of my other favorite wedding planning playlist suggestions:

Continue reading "Congratulations to the winners of the mywedding.com/offbeat bride contest!" →

I've spent the month of August poking around mywedding.com and writing about my adventures. This final week takes the (wedding) cake with an Offbeat Bride/mywedding.com contest!

Let's do a little review of my time with mywedding.com:

• They've got great free wedding websites with non-barfy templates.
• They've got a wedding blog filled with great advice.
• They've got local wedding guides packed with vendors, some of them indie.

And then there's the mywedding.com contests! Past mywedding.com contests include stuff like vacations in the Bahamas and romantic getaways. Because seriously: when you're in the stressed out wedding planning mode, we ALL could use a little time away. I'm totally jealous of Larry and Anitra.

As a special treat for Offbeat Brides, mywedding.com is now hosting the Offbeat Bride Something Blue contest, where you and your beloved could win matching blue iPod Nanos!

I'd like to reach up mywedding.com's dress to fetch its garter, because they're Offbeat Bride's sponsor for the month of August! I'll be poking around mywedding.com this month and writing about my adventures, this week looking at their local wedding planning guides.

The only problem with running a national/international wedding blog is that sometimes it all comes down to location, location, location. When someone emails me asking about help with venue ideas in Santa Barbara or an offbeat caterer in Houston, I have no idea what to say because, well, I live in Seattle and I don't know shit about Houston. Or Santa Barbara.

But not so with mywedding.com! They have a local wedding planning guide for dozens of American cities, ranging from the biggies you might expect like a New York and Los Angeles, but also Kansas City and Raleigh.

Continue reading "mywedding.com's local wedding guides (with indie vendors!)" →