by Amy

Amy got married in late 2009 and was a runner up in Dancing with the Brides. She offers these tips on choosing wedding vendors and getting registered.

Editor's disclosure: Shiny Orb is an Amazon Associate.

Wedding vendors:

When you first get engaged, you are beyond excited and giddy. But once that excitement comes down a notch, you are instantly overwhelmed with the number of things that must get done before the big day. Without a wedding planner, one of the toughest things in the planning process is picking your vendors because good vendors can make your day absolutely wonderful while bad vendors can ruin a wedding. Sometimes, you may hear about vendors by word of mouth from trusted friends or family members. That makes things easy. But if you don't have that option, you can always use the internet to help you make your decisions.

For us, we were getting married on Long Island and as it turns out, there's a fantastic wedding board out there called LIWeddings.com where brides can give other brides advice and recommendations. We used this site heavily to get an initial list of vendors to visit and consider. Then we visited and talked to those selected vendors and made our decisions that way. Another site that is helpful is WeddingBee - there you'll also find reviews and advice from other brides.

Wedding registries:
 
Wedding registries are a really fun part of the wedding process. This is the time for you and your fiance(e) to start imagining what your new home will be like and what you'd like to have in it. We started with one registry at Bed Bath and Beyond because we were mostly looking for kitchen items and BBB had fairly reasonable prices and a very wide assortment of options for each item. They also have a great return policy in case a certain item ended up not fitting into our new home. The key to putting together a good registry is to add items with a wide range of prices and to add a lot of items. That way, your guests can have more options. For us, we thought we had added a ton of things but in the end, as the registry started getting filled, we realized that our friends and families wanted us to put more items on it. We started to go beyond the typical kitchen items to other items that we would like and ended up signing up for a registry with Amazon.com. They often have free shipping for items over $25, which is an added bonus for our guests.

Editor's note: It is also common practice for many stores to offer you a 10% discount on items that remain unpurchased from wedding registry.  So, don't be shy in adding more items!