7 Popular Wedding Planning Websites

Planning a wedding can be a pain. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for poring over magazine over magazine, and calling every woman I know who got married in the recent past to ask her who her hairstylist was or where she got those nifty initial stamps.

It's just that there's a really huge difference between looking at pretty wedding stuff and actually planning the big day. The latter requires way more legwork, dedication, and resourcefulness than the former, no matter how religious a wedding junkie you may be.

Add to this the numerous time constraints, a possibly moody planner you had to fire, and you're bound to spontaneously combust with the stress building up inside.

Fortunately (and I repeat this quite often), the ever-faithful Internet has scores of websites that help you plan your entire wedding from the biggies like venue selection and the dress to the tiny details like what kind of paper to use for your wedding stationery.

Showcased here are 7 really popular websites (in no particular order) that you might want to have a look at before stress gets the better of you and you decide to elope.

How it Helps: Wedding planners can be expensive, and the knot is one of the best reasons you can have for not hiring one. It deals with each and every aspect related to the big day, neatly divided into easily locatable categories and sub-categories.

Whether you're a bride who wants a vintage-style wedding with your bridesmaids dressed in long-flowing gowns, or are looking for something offbeat and quirky like a hipster-themed wedding, this website has got it all.

You'll have to sign up (it's free!) to get into the real details of each section, but as they put it themselves, "it's fast, free, and worth it - we promise."

Why it's Awesome: Every time you open the homepage, you're hit with a superbly coordinated grid of wedding ideas all in one color scheme. Makes it that much easier to dive right in!

Get Planning: www.theknot.com

How it Helps: Think Martha Stewart and you think of beautiful, elegant, and totally doable things around the house. And then she took it one step further with this amazing website that offers a bride-to-be with advice and ideas for everything that goes into planning a wedding.

Real weddings are a constant, and every detail of them is appropriately documented. You do have to register yourself or sign in using your Facebook account to use the planning tools, but that's a breeze.

Why it's Awesome: It is a perfect blend of DIY and luxury ideas that cater to different kinds of brides.

Get Planning: www.marthastewartweddings.com

How it Helps: This wonderful wedding planning website is a cornucopia of beautiful, creative, and elegant wedding ideas. Featuring pictures from various blogs and websites, it is brimming with ideas that any bride will love to incorporate into her wedding.

It features a lot of real weddings, so you can rest assured that the ideas they showcase aren't out-of-the-world bizarre. Again, you're going to have to sign up to use features like the budgeting tool, but that isn't a real problem.

Why it's Awesome: It has an 'Ask the Experts' section where brides-to-be can ask those tough questions that no one's willing to answer otherwise.

Get Planning: www.mywedding.com

How it Helps: Another stellar website for planning the perfect wedding, WeddingWire has quite an array of planning tools that any bride-to-be will need in her arsenal (or at least she will after she's on this website). You have to sign up to use any of them, but hey it's all free!

It also has sections dedicated to advice and questions relating to before, during, and after the wedding, and sections to get great deals on wedding stuff. Like most other wedding planning websites, it also has the facility to create your inspiration board and virtually hoard all the pretty in the world until you make up your mind.

Why it's Awesome: The free wedding website, app, and binders that they offer are to die for.

Get Planning: www.weddingwire.com

How it Helps: This website lets you create Ideabooks, quite like Pinterest's boards; so basically, it's like a full-blown Pinterest dedicated only to weddings (did I hear you sigh?). Décor, food, stationery, shoes, whatever you want ideas for, onewed has it.

You can also easily find local vendors for whatever you need for your wedding by simply selecting your location from a drop-down. It also gives you a map so that you can know exactly where your vendors are located. How sweet!

Why it's Awesome: It also lets you know how much what you like can cost, if the vendor is tagged, that is.

Get Planning: www.onewed.com

How it Helps: Another gorgeous website that you're bound to get hooked to once you're on it. You can sort ideas and options by theme, style, color, flowers, season, setting, whew! What else do you need?! For items like clothes, jewelry, accessories, etc., it showcases various designers and vendors and links back to them so that you can shop right away.

Why it's Awesome: The simple and sleek design is refreshing. The real weddings featured are a great source of inspiration.

Get Planning: www.stylemepretty.com

How it Helps: This website showcases only real weddings. It follows a system wherein a recently married couple can choose to share pictures of their wedding and also review vendors (which are tagged to the website). This way, all you have to do is click on a wedding, and scroll down to know who the vendor for each element in the wedding was.

Inspiration can be taken by anyone who visits the website, but to contact or get more information about specific aspects, you'll have to sign up, log in, and use the dashboard option.

Why it's Awesome: The different little hearts all around the website that signify things like vendor recommendations and others are cute as ever. Read the FAQs page to understand it better. The quirky About C&C page is a fun read too.

Get Planning: caratsandcake.com

All the websites mentioned here have one thing in common: stunning pictures. Photographs, after all, are the life of any wedding website, and these websites take the proverbial cake and share it among themselves almost equally in that department.

We recommend you sign up on more than one of them to get a variety of ideas that you can mix and match to have your perfect wedding.