How to choose among wedding planners

When the phrase wedding planners comes up, a few things might come to mind for most brides and grooms. First of all, there's the wedding planner who is a walking, talking human being who helps you plan a wedding. There are two types of wedding planner professionals, and they are 1) the wedding planners who help you plan and organize every aspect of your wedding, from your invites and engagement party through your ceremony and reception and day-after brunch, and 2) the day-of wedding planners who focus mainly on the ceremony and reception. Although the work load for each of these differs, most brides who hire either type of wedding planning professional do so for a few reasons:

1. Wealth of knowledge - Many brides have no idea where to start in planning a wedding, and that's not a knock on them. For most people, it's their first time getting married, and it's also the first time they've ever had to plan any kind of event, let alone a 1 to 3 day event that might involve up to 300 people. That's a huge undertaking, and recruiting a professional who knows what to do down to the minute details makes sense.
   
2. Organizational assistance - There can be tons of itty bitty details in planning your wedding, and if you're not a details person, wedding planning can quickly become a nightmare. This is where wedding planners can be a big help.
   
3. Logistical help - We all need help sometimes figuring out the logistics of things - when to hold an event (time of year, time of week, time of day), where to hold it, how to bring it all together. Professional wedding planners do this well and with panache.
   
4. Vendor relationships - This is one of the more critical benefits of hiring a professional wedding planner. They have established relationships with vendors who follow through and deliver on their promises. As many brides unfortunately get burned every year by wedding vendors who don't follow through or even rip them off, having a wedding planner bring in their tried-and-true vendors is a weight off a bride's shoulders.

There's a second kind of wedding planner that's been around for a long time, and that's a wedding binder or wedding organizer that lets a bride collect all their ideas, notes, estimates, clippings and whatnot in one place. These have been under the arms of brides for decades, and although they do still have a place, that's mainly for jotting down ideas or collecting loose papers or clippings. Most books require you to write down everything at least once (if not twice or thrice), are inconsistent in what sections they have and, if you forget where you put them, well, you're out of luck.

This is where online wedding planners can really be a big help to brides. Although they may not coordinate everything like a professional wedding planner, they are excellent ways of organizing all your wedding details and tracking your progress in planning your wedding. Online wedding planners - which also go by wedding planning software or wedding planning programs - have a number of benefits, which include:

1. Less cost - An online wedding planner is a fraction of the cost of a wedding planning professional, and now there are many free online wedding planners that are as good as anything you would pay for.
2. Very detailed - When you hire a wedding planning professional, you may not always know the status of your wedding. Not so with an online wedding planner, which offers an always-current overview of your wedding and where you are at in the planning process.
3. Your wedding details are safe and secure - Online wedding planners store your information on secure servers in a location far away from your home computer. So you have the convenience of always being able to access your data online without the risk of losing your data if your computer crashes or it damaged.
4. No downloading, installing or updating - Wedding software of the past required that you needed to download and install the software before you could use it, and you had to regularly update it. Online wedding planning software runs on your Web browser via the Internet, so you never again have to download, install or update anything.
5. Very connected - The best online wedding planners connect you to a number of different tools that make planning a wedding even easier. For example, some wedding software has task calendars and email reminders to remind you of appointments and deadlines, while other online software has tools so you can quickly and easily build your own Wedding web site.
6. Perfect for do-it-yourself brides - Many brides take pride in planning their own wedding and would never think to hire a wedding planning professional. Online wedding planning software programs give them the guidance and tools they need to stay organized and on track so their wedding comes out just as they dream it will.
   
7. Event wedding planning professionals use software to keep them organized, so why wouldn't you take advantage of using an online wedding planner to help you, too.

So, whether you have a small wedding or big wedding, when your wedding plans call for getting organized, an online wedding planner can be exactly what you need.