1) I am a big fan of videos. With today's technology it's easy to quickly edit together a movie trailer, slide show, or little skit about the story of your relationship or announcing your engagment or wedding. Many people are using sites like their blogs and YouTube to send out Save the Dates. I'm sure you've seen a few of these throughout the blogosphere:
2) If you don't have the time, software or knowledge to do something like that though you can always use free sites like photobucket.com or slide.com to create a simple slideshow of photos with captions. Or get even more creative and actually make signs to hold up in your photos. I quickly threw together this mini slideshow in Photobucket for an example. You could post this on your blog or e-mail the link to friends and family. You could take it a step further by typing something like this in the e-mail:
You can't run!
You can't hide!
From the relationship that just.......won't......DIE!!!!
The Story of Us
Stacey & John are ENGAGED!
Coming soon to a church near you...
Stay tuned....
3) Another idea is if you have a niece or a friend's daughter you know you will want to ask to be your flowergirl. You could take a photo of her throwing flower petals in the air and write a caption over the photo (or put a sign in the photo with her) that says "I'm going to be a flowergirl in Aunt Jenn's wedding!" E-mail (or mail) the photo out to friends and family and maybe even write the story of the proposal in the e-mail. You can do something like this with just about anything: Pets, children, friends or even the happy couple. Just have them hold up photos and create a photo strip or 'card' spelling out the exciting news.
4) Along the lines of the slideshow above, you can use a site like http://www.shutterfly.com/ to create an online photo album where you can write out your love story next to the photos. Send the link to family and friends with a note that says "We created a fun online photo album that we wanted to share with you." Then next to the pics put things like "Here's us on our cruise to Mexico." "Here's the first time John ever told me he loved me." The very last one will be a pic of you two with your engagement ring or with him on one knee proposing and you write out "And here's John proposing to me! And now we're engaged!"
5) Sites like theknot.com and jibjab.com also have these silly e-videos you can create by uploading a photo of yourself and framing your face in it. They then put your faces on someone else's body and have you doing a silly dance or something like that. You can e-mail the link to the e-video to friends and family or embed it on your blog as a silly way to announce your engagement! Here's some silly examples I quickly created:
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6) Sites like http://www.motionbox.com/ allow you to upload videos and send them as e-cards to people. Using a web cam, video cam on your photo camera or cell phone or an actual video camera, you can create a simple video message, skit or whatever and then upload it to these sites and add messages to e-mail to friends and family.
Using a site like onfuego.com (a little more risque but totally usable), you can do something like this where those who view your card can even leave comments about it:
7) One of my FAVORITE simple e-card announcements is this one from bluemountain.com: http://www.bluemountain.com/display.pd?prodnum=3103161&path=83058
So, what do you think? I just quickly tried to throw these ideas together...what are some ways you announced your engagement or suggestions for Jenn on how to use technology to do so? We actually told most of our family and friends over the phone or in person. But for those we don't see as often, we created a wedding website and then sent an e-mail out to all our friends and family telling them to check out our new site. It had all the info and stories about our relationship, proposal, etc. Check it out here: http://www.staceyandjohn.weddingwindow.com/. The plus to this feature is that I can use it to collect RSVP's for all kinds of wedding related events and on the back administrative end of it, I am able to keep track of things like addresses for guest lists, budgets, to-do lists, vendor contact info, etc.
