How to Get Your Wedding Guest List and Invites

When you make the huge decision to become married and officially become engaged, it marks not only one of the greatest times of your life, but also probably one of the busiest. With an engagement and a future wedding there is much need for celebration, but there is also a need to realize that you're in for some serious work now that you only have a set amount of time to get your wedding planned. It's nothing to be too stressed about and you need to have fun while doing it, but just know ahead of time that to properly plan a wedding it takes dedication from not only the couple that's walking down the aisle, but also from many other friends, family and co-workers that will be involved in the planning as well.

One thing that I would suggest right off the bat is to find a few friends or members of your family that you trust can be of a huge help to you during this time and get them involved as soon as possible wit your planning. This will be fun for them and it will take a lot of work of your plate, which is always a good thing.

As I continue to plan my wedding, one of the things that I have focused on due to its importance to me is the creation of the wedding guest list and deciding who I am going to invite to my wedding. For my particular wedding I am having 200 guests, so that is my limit when sifting through all of the potential invites that I could send out to my many, many family, friends and family. Getting a proper guest list together that I am happy with is very important to me, so it's something that I've spent a lot of time working on. I've learned a few things along the way while I've been doing this, so I'm hoping to pass on a few tips to you so that you can get a great guest list together, too. Here are some thoughts on how you can end up with that perfect wedding guest list that you'd love to see at your upcoming wedding.

The first thing that you need to figure out is how many guests you can invite to your wedding because this will set the overall limit of people who will be attending your wedding and dinner. After you come up with that number, you need to come up with the people that you definitely have to invite to your wedding. Here's how I went through the various family, friends and others who I was thinking about inviting to my wedding:

Wedding Party: You need to obviously make sure that your wedding party is invited to your wedding and that they are going to be taken care of once they show up for your big day.

Family: For some of us (like me), family will take up a substantial amount of your wedding seats, so be sure to figure out who you want to be there and whom you don't. Also, something to remember is that you should look at your family by layers and once you decide what layer you want to invite to you should stick with it. I ended up inviting my close family, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and all of their kids. It adds up fast, but it's the layers of family that I chose.

Send Out Save The Dates: I'm pretty sure that most people do this already, but be sure to send out some fun save the dates about 4 months before your wedding so that your guests know that they're invited and can plan ahead.

Use Technology To Keep Track Of Who You're Inviting: This seems like a no-brainer, but using technology such as Google Docs so that you can share who you've invited to your wedding and keeping track of it as a couple will make your life much easier. Also, now that most of our friends were on Facebook, we have been able to use that technology to keep track of our invites as well.