Over the years we have been fortunate enough to be a part of hundreds of successful events. Through those experiences we’ve seen lots of success stories, but also things that perhaps could have gone better. During every planning appointment with our clients we use those experiences to help guide our clients to creating a wedding that matches their vision, but avoids any potential pitfalls.
This is our Top 10 Wedding Tips for making sure you have a fantastic wedding day:
- Savor the moment of your first dance
- On your wedding day you will feel like a celebrity. The entire day you will have vendors, friends and family waiting on you hand and foot to make sure you have what you need and are enjoying yourself. You’ll have photographers snapping gorgeous photos. And, you’ll have a timeline thoughtfully put together to make sure your day comes together as you planned it. But let me tell you, it will feel like a whirlwind. By the end of the night, you might realize you haven’t spent but a moment or two enjoying your time as a newly married couple. Use the first dance for this time. Yes, people are watching, ignore them. Use that moment to get lost in yourselves and remember why all of this is happening in the first place.
- Eat your meal before you make table rounds
- I cannot tell you how many perfectly cooked steaks and crab cakes I’ve seen dying on a sweetheart’s table because a couple is off making the rounds talking with their guests. Your guests are excited to see you, but remember that this is your day, take some time to enjoy it. Plus, if you plan on having a few drinks throughout the evening, a good meal will be a great start on making sure things stay classy.
- Calculate how much time you have to visit each table during your planning
- This time will absolutely fly. A typical dinner service is around an hour for a two course menu. You’ll be served first, and lets assume you eat in 20 minutes leaving you 40 minutes to make the rounds. If you have 120 guests seated 10 to a table – you’ve got 3.3 minutes per table if you visit each one. I always mention this to my couples because what often happens in these situations is that your natural tendency would be to spend closer to 10 minutes per table. You’d get through 3 of them, and then your DJ or coordinator will politely let you know that you’ve got 10 minutes until dancing should begin, at which point you realize how many tables are left and panic just a bit. Your final rounds will either be very rushed, you’ll skip a lot of tables, or you’ll request more time. If you need more time, it’s not a problem (this is your day, of course), but you should know you’ll be shortening the time period of something later in your evening, typically dancing and celebrating.
- Begin your table rounds with guests that have travelled from afar
- We hope with the advice from #3 that you don’t find yourself too pressed for time. But, it could still happen. That’s why we recommend starting your table rounds with guests that may have travelled a long way to see you, or more distant family members. Your best friends, or your bridal party have likely been with you all day. Or, they’ve seen you recently in another social setting. While you don’t want to belittle the effort they have put into your day, you will probably also see lots of them on the dance floor all night.
- Think about your venue’s layout when preparing your schedule
- Many unique wedding spaces will have an impact on the way you set up your timeline for your wedding. For example, if your dance floor is not in the same room as your dining room (like Woodend Sanctuary, Meridian House, or LongView Gallery), you may choose to save your first dance until after the meal has finished, versus having it after introductions. You want to avoid your guests feel like they’re being cattle prodded from one area to another. Movement isn’t bad, and might be necessary, but these situations require that you’re thoughtful about where your guests need to be for a particular moment.
- Keep everyone in mind when thinking about your music planning
- We often talk about making sure our couple’s “fingerprints” are all over their wedding music program. You should influence the music, and it should reflect your taste and style. But if the groom is exclusively into Metallica, it might not be fun to ignore what your guests may like in favor of an all-Metallica playlist (perhaps Apocalyptica’s string version of Nothing Else Matters might fit nicely into cocktail or dinner music?). The point, of course, being that your guests have put a lot of effort into your wedding, just as you have in planning it. Be thoughtful towards what they want as you consider the soundtrack for your event.
- Try not to leave a big gap between your ceremony and the start of your reception
- If your ceremony will be at a church, sometimes this is impossible to avoid. But, if at all possible you should try to keep your ceremony and reception as close as possible. Typically when there is too much time in between guests will either arrive VERY early to your reception venue, head to the bar to “pre-game,” or wait around in hotel rooms/lobbies/etc. If this is unavoidable, the best idea I have seen is to plan an activity for your guests in the meantime. A couple I worked with not long ago planned to have their guests taken on a bus tour of Washington D.C. during the time before the reception started – very cool.
- Decide on a Social Media Policy before your event and communicate it to guests
- In the smartphone/Twitter/Instagram/Facebook world it is very easy to have the intimacy of your wedding spread before you are ready. Some couples love this, they create their own hashtag and ask guests to fire away when it comes to posting their photos in real time. But, if that isn’t what you want, make sure your guests know. At particularly sensitive times like your ceremony, it might be important to ask guests to not take their own photos purely to keep them out of the way of your professional photographer’s sight lines. Nobody wants to be stuck with this image because they didn’t politely ask their guests to not take photos.
- Skip “traditions” that you don’t love
- This could be anything from the garter toss to line dances (ugh…). In its purest form, a wedding should simply be a ceremony of marriage and a celebration. Don’t feel pressured to add more things to your agenda simply because you’ve seen them at other weddings. If you love the idea of tossing a bouquet – awesome! But, you get to be in control of your wedding, so make sure you don’t waste time with things that you think are silly or meaningless.
- On the day-of, go with the flow
- It’s an old military saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Weddings are similar, except there is no enemy. Despite the most immaculate plans, it is important to keep the day in perspective. Your celebration will be just that. Your friends and family love you, otherwise they wouldn’t show up. And, if you’ve put together a great team of vendors, they will respond beautifully to changing circumstances. Rain, snow, wrong colored cake? I’ve seen them all, and none of them actually stopped a wedding from happening. Do your best to plan thoughtfully, but if something goes sideways try to laugh it off and keep on enjoying your day.
We hope you find those helpful, and if you’ve got thoughts that we didn’t include, please let us know in the comments. We are always looking for more ways to help the couples we work with have incredible wedding days!