Whilst wedding planning I had a crazy messy binder full of notes, business cards, wedding songs and other numerous and sundry items. And I'm not good at organizing at all, so I lost a lot of papers and a few times the actual binder itself!

My Wedding Binder is an online, virtual wedding planning binder that works very much like a physical binder with easy-to-use and customizable planning tools. They charge a one time membership fee of $29.95 (but we got you the hook-up on a nice discount — more about that later) and for that you get to never have to be bombarded with thousands of pop-ups and advertisements for obnoxious WIC bullshit again!

I spent a while tooling around the site and was like this the whole time. They have freaking EVERYTHING that you'd ever need:

Continue reading "My Wedding Binder will slap your wedding organization into shape" →

As you enter another budget line on your wedding Excel spreadsheet and pop open another tab in your web browser to update your Snipi with another bit of inspiration, have you ever stopped for a second and thought — whoa, this is hard work. And then realized, "…I should be getting paid to do this work!"

Now, I don't necessarily mean you should become a wedding planner, although some of us offbeat types DO find ourselves working in the wedding industry. (I NEVER EVER thought I'd write a book about weddings, and then end up working in the wedding media biz. How the hell did that happen!?)

So while "I planned my wedding, now I'll plan yours!" does happen, what I'm talking about here is the ways that planning a wedding help you develop skills that can be applied to non-wedding jobs. You're building skills that could help you move up a career ladder in whatever industry you work in … or WISH you worked in.

Here's a quick list of employable skills you might be developing while you work on your wedding:

Continue reading "How planning your wedding could help your career" →

Finally, a checklist for offbeat brides! Obviously, no checklist can work for everyone, but this one is hopefully a bit more slanted toward offbeat concerns. That said, it assumes you're got about a seven month engagement — some of you are waaay longer, and some of you manage to do it all in three months. Your mileage may vary.

So, now it's time to print this out and start checking the boxes!

Download this checklist as a free PDF!

Continue reading "The official offbeat wedding checklist" →

Aww, who's that adorable little tot wobbling down the aisle with a basket of rose petals? Why, it's Nearlyweds!, offbeatbride.com's sponsor for the month of November! Join me as I get elbow deep in the Wed 2.0 geekery of the Nearlyweds! wedding websites.

Ok, let's start with the basics: Nearlyweds! is the wedsite service for those of you want great wedding website designs, total control over your website content, absolutely no ads anywhere, and lots of slick features like interactive maps, blogging with comments, etc. Dude, your guests can add their own wedding porn, even! Let's just call it Wed 2.0 and get the pun out of the way.

Nearlyweds! is fellow Seattle-based wedding biz, and you know how you can tell?

Continue reading "Nearlyweds! wedding websites and rad guest maps" →

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!)" →