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SITE OF THE WEEK

If you really have to get married -- you need help. The Web is the new source for wedding planning. So we pulled together some of the sites that may guide you on y our way to Seacoast wedded bliss.

SCROLL down for wedding links

When you purchase your marriage license in Portsmouth, as I did last week, the town clerk hands you a purple plastic "First Moments" Newlywed Pack. It contains a free Glad plastic leftovers container, packets of Tide detergent and Folgers coffee, 16 Bounty paper napkins with pictures of teddy bears, Ice Blue Secret deodorant and a travel sample of Oil of Olay. We were also required to sign a form agreeing that we had received and read brochures on family planning, HIV infection, and fetal alcohol syndrome. The messages are clear -- avoid disease and buy crap. How totally American it is to transform a blissful moment into a cheesy commercial and a dreary public service announcement.

No original thinking here. I knew the marriage process was going to be a gauntlet of conspicuous consumerism. It started six months back when I brought what I considered to be a fair chunk of money into one of the classy jewelry shops downtown. I told the woman with the impeccable ensemble what I was looking for in an engagement ring and showed her my budget.

"I think," she said, "you might be happier shopping at the mall." She said it with the same voice Alec Guiness used in the film "Arthur" when he says of low-life Liza Minelli something like: "To find women of her stature one must usually look in a bowling alley."

Another storekeeper actually recounted a mathematical formula for me in which the cost of the appropriate engagement ring can be neatly calculated by dividing the total of the groom's annual income by a fixed ratio and multiplying by 24 neat monthly payments.

I suppose frugal is just another word for cheap, but by mutual agreement, we decided a wedding should be more about love and community than about credit cards and convention. Even without ushers, photographer, vidoegrapher, caterer, a multi-tiered cake that no one wants to eat, rental hall, wedding planner, deejay, limousine, rehearsal dinner and a florist -- we're spending plenty.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

There is no end of Web sites catering to the matrimonially inclined. That's because there's gold in them thar nuptials. When in one's life, other than the purchase of a house, a car, or a college education, do we spend more wildly? I heard of a "typical" couple who spent $30,000 on their local wedding just last week, including a catered lunch for 100 guests at $140 per plate. What exactly can one swallow in hour that costs so much? The total for that lunch alone equals the price of a decent new Toyota. Sorry folks, I don't get it.

Good wedding web sites offer truly helpful advice and act as clearing houses of information. Bad wedding sites offer little more than ad-formation and act merely as laxatives for the wallet. I admit, I've even built my own online wedding guide on my search engine (listed below), but true to form, I haven't made a dime off it. And I was surprised to find I own the domain name SeacoastWedding.com which has been languishing for years.

Most wedding web sites offer the same info you can find in the phone book mostly -- wedding photographers, cake bakers, jewelers, bridal shops, function halls, party supply shops, musicians, wine merchants and the like. But to its credit, portals are what the web does best, and it's no different here. Cruising these sites allows couples to review a variety of wedding products and vendors quickly, helping them qualify choices, get ideas and centralize data. The less familiar you are with the region, the more the web site helps.

I've listed some of the best web wedding sites at the end of this article. The quality is all over the map, from classy to tacky. I guess one could say the same for weddings they engender. A friend of mine in the 80s got married while going around the Portsmouth Traffic circle with two witnesses and a minister in the back of a van. I think it took only about 20 rotations and cost a dollar for gas. Then they went to the beach. Another couple I know spent $1000 on the cake alone. Both couples, from what I hear, are divorced.

What the Web offers, largely, is the access to traditional info. What people who call me seem to want instead is inside info -- the undiscovered scenic chapels, historic houses with rentable gardens, unique scenic photo locations along the coast. These people are inevitably not from our region, many have never even been here before. They imagine a coastal or a mountain wedding in New England with all the romantic haze of foggy sunrise. Somebody should make a buck off these people before they wake up, but I fear it won't be me.

I suggest readers being with the online wedding budget page in the Wedding Garden site listed below. I checked. We’re right on budget.

THE UP SHOT

I live on the Web, but must confess, during this six-month process, we didn't find a single wedding item online. Even a long search for bridal shoes, a species of footwear I had not known existed, led nowhere. Turns out we’re not alone in rejecting the chic costly ceremony concept. A new book by Carolyn Gerin and Stepahnie Rosenbaum called The Anti-Bride Guide takes on the stereotyped high-brow ceremony cartel. This book preaches abstinence, not from sex, but from the seductive power of materialism that says money and love are synonyms. We saved even more money by sticking to the theory, but not buying the book. The web site, AntiBride.com , just opened this week.

But still the Web turned out to be invaluable for two reasons. First, it's great for travel planning. I picked out a superb little honeymoon cottage in the Scottish West Hebrides on an isolated island I'd never heard of. I talked to the editor of the island newspaper, the Corn Crake, by email and corresponded with the woman renting the "self catering" cottage (includes everything but linens and coal) for the local Scottish laird. Then, using the Web, I found out how much it was going to cost to fly there -- and we decided to go to Canada.

Secondly, the Internet is a great place to coordinate the coming hoard. We posted a web page with detailed info for guests. Now they know how to get here, what to see while in town, and exactly where to park thanks to detailed online street maps. We helped people find hotels and plane flights. A friend living in Alaska is coordinating the pot luck via a list server. We've dealt with issues of gifts, children, drinks, warming trays -- all online. We picked some recorded music and a friend downloaded the selections via MP3 files to a compact disk. We shipped photos for the invitations to the graphic designer, and even sent a revised draft of the vows to the minister via email.

And now, the list:

WEDDING LINKS, MOSTLY LOCAL

The Anti-Bride
antibride.com

New England Bridal Mall
nebridalmall.com

Seacoast Bride
seacoastbride.com

The Wedding Portfolio
theweddingportfolio.com

The Wedding Garden
weddingarden.com

NH Weddings Mall
nhweddings.com

New Hampshire.com
newhampshire.com/wedding

NH Wedding Book
theweddingbook.net

Ultimate Wedding
ultimatewedding.com

All Wedding Companies
allweddingcompanies.com