It’s safe to say that nearly all weddings today incorporate technology -to some extent.
From behind the scenes wedding preparations, to virtual guests, it’s amazing what you can do with a computer or a smartphone!
Technology allows us to connect with others, and share information faster than ever before, and it has had an especially big impact on weddings.
Read on to see some of the fantastic ways that technology is changing modern weddings.
Wedding Announcements
Many couples today are opting for paperless invitations. Love them or hate them, paperless invitations have a number of things going for them; they save time, and loads of money. Traditional paper wedding announcements can be surprisingly costly, and it takes a lot time to address and stuff all those envelopes. Virtual wedding announcements have come a long way in recent years, with companies like Paperless Post offering beautiful, and tastefully designed virtual wedding announcements.
Wedding Updates
Social media is a great way to keep guests up-to-date on all of the details leading up to your big day. Creating a group on Facebook and inviting all of the guests allows you to easily notify guests of any changes. This makes updating relatives much, much easier than making individual phone calls. Plus, there’s no need to worry about “spamming” uninterested people with status updates. Keep your wedding-themed updates to the group, and allow interested guests to join.
Online Wedding Planning
You’d be hard pressed to find a bride-to-be who hasn’t heard of Pinterest. Technology brings a plethora of information to browse through, and allows brides-to-be to collect and display images of their favorite cake designs, ideal wedding dresses, and various moss-covered decorations. Online wedding planning has to be one of the best things that technology has done for weddings. Once upon a time, couples-to-be had to order though magazines, or were forced to settle with what was available in town. Yikes! Bridal sites today can refer you to caterers, wedding suppliers, musicians, and venues, and your wedding options today are virtually limitless.
Music Selection
Thanks to Google, YouTube, and Spotify, there’s never been an easier way to choose music for a wedding. You can look up music by genre, year, or similar artist, and can compile it all in in one place. When you have your playlist, use Spotify to download the music to a local playlist. This saves loads of time –and money, preventing you from buying music that’s not usually sold on a per-track basis.
Online Wedding Registries
Online wedding registries are fun and simple to create. Creating a registry doesn’t take more than a few clicks, and then you can have fun adding various “necessities” to your list. It’s like a wish list –only better! Many guests actually prefer to gift using a wedding registry, since is takes the guess work out of gifting. They also allow your guests to refrain from purchasing you the obligatory toasters. It’s a win-win situation for all!
Simplified Travel
Remember what it was like back in the days before online booking? Today, booking is easier and more efficient than ever before. Plus, booking online also allows you to compare rates and find the best deals. If you are having a destination wedding, or are simply trying to help coordinate travel for out of town guests, online booking is the way to go. This comes in handy when planning the honeymoon as well.
Virtual Guests
While it’s always best if everyone’s together, there are always guests who can’t make it. Streaming your ceremony live allows out-of-towners to still be a part of your big day –from a distance. If live video streaming is a bit much, you could opt for a live photo stream for out of town guests to tap into. It’s easy to set up! Simply open up a Sharypic account, and create your own album for your event. Then copy and paste two lines of code into your wedding blog or website. When your wedding guests upload their photos and tag them with your hashtag, your photos will appear in the live stream on your blog! It’s a great way to allow of town guests a chance to see your wedding.
Wedding Favors
Wedding favors are a much-loved wedding tradition. While many couples send their guests off with home baked treats (which are always nice!) modern couples are choosing to present their guests with memories –in the form of personalized flash drives, or YouTube music videos –full of photos and footage from the big day.
Collecting Photos With a Wedding App
With all of the different social media websites out there, it can be difficult to track down of all the photos that your guests take at your wedding. If you want to make sure you can collect all of those special images, you may want to consider setting up a wedding app which will collect all of the photos for you in one place. With Sharypic, all your guests have to do is download the app, or tag the photos with your hashtag when they upload them to their social media accounts. Your photos will then be curated in one place for you to look at later. It’s a simple way to make sure you don’t miss any photos from your special day.
Another great thing about Sharypic, is the live printing feature. This allows you to offer guests the chance to print their own photos of your wedding. This is a perfect way for friends and family to choose -and print- their favorite shots from your special day. All you need is a printer that’s compatible with postcard format, and a Sharypic account, and you’re ready to go!
So there you have it: nine ways that technology is changing weddings today.
From the planning process to the actual day, technology is changing weddings –for everyone involved. Sharing information with others is what it’s all about, and thanks to technology, this is easier now than ever before!
We look forward to the future, where technology will undoubtedly be impacting other aspects of weddings and bringing changes to every sector of our lives.
Here’s to a bright and happy future!
What do you think? What are some other ways that technology is changing modern weddings?
Author: Christina Harman, Images credits: Katsu Nojiri (Creative Common, no change made)