Where to go for gowns, gifts and guides

Websites offer wedding advice on almost everything - even the weather.

* www.nz-wedding.co.nz


Huge wedding portal with links to the usual flowers, dresses and venue hires, right through to gay-friendly celebrants and weather predictions. (The weather prediction site is run by the lunar-weather fraternity, who believe meteorology is now dominated by a "politically elite group". How internet!)

* www.weddings-nz.co.nz


The other main New Zealand wedding planner website. Very good. Not too advertising-heavy.

* www.piperpat.co.nz/nz/weddings.html


This has good links to dozens of websites for everything you would want - from flowers and cakes to celebrants. It lists itself as having almost all the websites you could want for weddings.

* www.bridalworks.com


United States wedding site. Described as "an average website for wedding gowns". The main plus is that it lists designers by name, so you can go to your favourite designer and run through the selections. Forty-four designers are listed, plus links to websites of stores offering a range of gowns.

* www.nzweddingplanner.co.nz


Great local website, tastefully done. You can create your own free wedding homepage so that friends and family can click on and find out how your wedding plans are going, your gift registry and so on. A clever idea. Good advice on planning every aspect of your wedding and a diary from brides-to-be, which is quite well done. A good service directory search.

* www.weddings.co.nz


This is a good one - sensible advice, easy-to-follow setup and featuring a segment on "real weddings" where you can click on couples who have recently tied the knot. A low-key home for New Zealand weddings on the internet.

* www.weddingheaven.co.nz


Another nicely done New Zealand wedding site. Offers a 12-step guide to "keeping it simple" which is quite good. Good service directory and lots of tips. Provides a link to download the application for a marriage licence. You can also announce your engagement on the site and submit the story of how you were proposed to!

* www.weddingchannel.com


A great site to search for gowns. It says it provides links to more than 20,000 gowns and you can browse by style, designer, neckline, price or whatever else you like. Also a lot of beauty tips.

* www.theknot.com


Described by one soon-to-be wed as "the ultimate wedding gown site". Hundreds and hundreds of gowns which you can search by typing in what you want - designer, style and so on. Also, you can create your own "my gowns" section, which will save the wedding dresses you like.

* www.invitesonly.co.nz


The best site to find invitations. Funky, modern designs.

* www.bridalgiftregistry.co.nz


Lets you create your gift registry online. This is New Zealand's first bridal gift registry and pretty good, too. You can arrange for your wedding guests to get password access and browse the list you have created.

* www.bridal.co.nz


All the good services you need and lets you view bridal shows around the country.

* www.weddinghumor.com


For the perfect tasteless joke to make during those cringe-inducing wedding speeches.

* www.ultimatewedding.com


A good place to see how the Americans run the whole marriage business. Includes "29 Handy Checklists", which you would probably need another checklist to organise.