Wedding Planning Help in N.I

Are you planning a wedding in Northern Ireland and feeling overwhelmed with all the details and decisions that need to be made? Do you need help planning your wedding? Don't worry, you are not alone. Planning a wedding is a significant undertaking, but with a little help and guidance, you can create the wedding of your dreams without any of the stress.

Most brides and grooms when they start to get concerned about organising all of the elements that make up their wedding day, at first consider hiring a wedding planner. A wedding planner is a professional who specialises in helping couples plan their wedding. They can provide you with guidance on everything from choosing a venue to selecting a menu. They can also help you stay within your budget and ensure that everything runs smoothly on the day of your wedding. By hiring a wedding planner, you can alleviate much of the stress that comes with planning a wedding and enjoy the process instead. However hiring a wedding planner can add significant cost to your Northern Ireland wedding. Did you know that are lots of free wedding planning resources available, that you can make use off?

Help With Your Northern Ireland Wedding

Another option for getting help with finding wedding vendors in Northern Ireland is to attend a wedding fair or show. These events are held throughout the year by individual venues, vendors and there are also some companies around whose sole business is organising wedding fairs. They can be an easy way to connect with vendors and get ideas for your wedding. You can meet photographers, caterers, florists, and other vendors who can help bring your wedding vision to life. Many vendors also offer special discounts and promotions for those who book their services at the fair. For most couples that all sounds great, but is it?

There are some disadvantages to finding vendors this way. Firstly if you only choose vendors you have seen at a wedding fair, it means you are only selecting vendors from a very small pool. It can be expensive for a vendor to book a stall at a wedding fair, so many vendors choose not to because of cost reasons, Wedding fairs also tend to attract a certain type of vendor, it’s a very hard nosed sales environment. A lot of vendors including ourselves don’t like that sort of hard sales approach to weddings. We will also share a secret with you, wedding fair discounts and promotions are often not real offers at all.

Vendors have to pay a fee to attend a wedding fair, they also have to purchase marketing material like leaflets, flyers, business cards, equipment for the display of the stand etc. and also have to use some of their valuable time as well. All of these costs have to be passed on to couples that book with them at the fair. It is not unusual for vendors to dramatically increase prices before attending a wedding fair so that they can cover all of the costs from being there and still be able to offer a “discount”. We get approached to attend wedding fairs on a regular basis. On one occasion a company explained that to make the fair successful for us we should increase our prices by £500 before attending and then offer a discount of £250.00 to anyone that booked on the day. This would mean that we would still be making £250.00 more than we would from normal bookings which would allow us to both provide a “discount” whilst also covering our costs. This way of doing business is definitely not for us, so we politely declined. You will never find us at a wedding fair.

Free resources to help plan your wedding
in Northern Ireland

We have lots of great free wedding planning resources available to everyone via our Northern Ireland Wedding Photography Blog. Over the years we have put together lots of helpful information to help make it easier for couples planning their wedding. Including information on everything from wedding planning tips and guides to free wedding budget planners and information on wedding photography restrictions.

Probably the best free resource we can suggest though is the wedding vendor group we have on Facebook. We started this group a few years ago as a way of helping our own clients easily find a good range of local wedding vendors, but even if you haven’t chosen us to photograph your wedding the group is available to everyone.

While some Facebook groups have went down the route of charging wedding vendors to be members if they wish to advertise, we have not. This means that you will find a great range of different wedding suppliers here and not just the vendors who are happy to pay a fee every year to be able to access it. Many of our own couples have used our Facebook group to plan their weddings.

In our Facebook group you will find wedding vendors from all over Northern Ireland including:

• Venues

• Wedding celebrants

• Venue styling businesses

• Make-up Artists

• Hairstylists

• Wedding Transport

• Wedding Entertainment

• Videographers

• Plus much more…

Along with being a great place to start finding a great range of different types of wedding vendors for your wedding our Facebook group has a lot of very experienced wedding professionals as members. If you have any questions on anything wedding related, they are always happy to help. You can join here.

Northern Ireland Wedding Directories

Another popular resource for couples planning a wedding in Northern Ireland are online wedding directories. The vast majority of these are free for couples to use but they can be expensive for wedding vendors. The best way to describe these is to think of them as an online version of a wedding fair.

Unlike wedding fairs, we have used lots of these over the years ourselves. We have seen these both from a vendors point of view and from the point of view of a potential client, There are thousands of online wedding directories in the U.K. There are also some local ones in Northern Ireland as well.

The best two wedding directories in the U.K that we have found to offer a great user experience for both couples seeking vendors and for vendors themselves are Hitched and Bridebook. These are two huge online businesses. Both have internal messaging systems so that it’s really easy for couples to get in touch with vendors and have apps that couples can use on your phone. Both allow vendors to share lots of images and videos of the work that they do so that couples have a good idea of what to expect from each vendor before they reach out to them.

Northern Ireland Wedding Planning

We hope all of the information provided here helps you find all the resources needed to make planning your wedding as easy and hassle free as possible. For our own couples we always happy to help with any wedding related questions they might have. If we don’t know the answer ourselves we are always happy to reach out to our friends in the wedding industry to ask for help, they haven’t let us down yet.

Also for couples that have booked us to photograph their wedding, we are always happy if needed to provide recommendations for great vendors we have worked with in the past. If you would like to find out if we are availble to photograph your wedding get in touch.

HAPPY WEDDING PLANNING!