Disney's Fairy Tale Wedding's Website Undergoes Huge Makeover

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Exciting news! The Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings website has undergone a major and much needed transformation. The site, which provided very little useful information, now has tons of new options including pricing, venue options, and inspiration photos.

Budget Fairy Tale: A Guide to Disney's Fairy Tale Wedding's New and Improved Website

There are several new features and I’ll go through each one briefly. Perhaps the coolest new feature is the “Weddings” menu option, which takes you to the “Dream Wedding Maker,” which will allow you to virtually plan your Disney wedding! It’s pretty much the planning pages in virtual form, but now they are available to anyone. All your venue options, upgrades, add-ons, and even pricing is laid out for you in a very easy to navigate manner. I’ll go over this in great detail later, so let’s skip over this for now and go to the next menu item: My Dream Space.

My Dream Space offers a number of cool tools to help you plan your wedding: Dream Boards, Dream Colors, Dream Wedding Maker, and Wedding Bio.

Dream Boards lets your browse through hundreds of Disney wedding images and create your own inspiration boards. They aren’t really inspiration boards as you are used to seeing them in the wedding world, but more like slide shows. Still, it’s a great way to save your favorite images and view them all together. They have pre-arranged titles for your custom boards (“cake” “flowers” “decor”), or you can create your own title.

With the My Color Palettes tool, you can choose from a limited selection color wheel and experiment with color combos for your wedding. While not specifically Disney related, overall a pretty cool tool.

The Dream Wedding Maker, as I said, we will come back to. The Wedding Bio is a place to explore your wedding personality with prompts such as “Describe your celebration using three adjectives.” These kinds of exercises, as cheesy as they may seem, are actually quite helpful when trying to narrow down your wedding vision. I suggest going over this section together with your partner.

The next menu item – Ever After Blog – we are all familiar with.

Next on the menu is the Bridal Boutique. Here you can browse all the products available through the Alfred Angelo DFTW partnership. I spotted tons of items, mostly accessories, that I didn’t even realize existed, so it’s worth a look even if you think you’re familiar with the AA line.

The Honeymoons menu features an interactive world map to help you plan your Disney Honeymoon, via theme park or cruise or Adventures By Disney. There is also a link to the Disney Honeymoon Registry.

The Engagements menu gives you some basic information about planning a proposal at a Disney Park or cruise. I think this might be a new page and I’m glad to see Disney acknowledging how popular they are for proposals, although I would like to see some more packages and options for engagements, aside from “call our dining reservation line.”

If you go a little further down the page, to the right of the lovely photo of Disneyland wedding couple PB&J, you’ll see “Find Inspiration.” This is a new tool and it’s pretty neat.

Via the Inspiration Gallery, you can scroll through hundreds of Disney wedding photos, save them to your Dream Boards, and “Love” items. You can select “Disney Picks,” “Popular,” “Categories,” and “Colors.”

The Inspiration Gallery reminds me a lot of Lover.ly, which is hardly a complaint because I really enjoy Lover.ly. But here’s my complaint: (You didn’t think we’d get through a post about DFTW’s online presence without a complaint, did you?) Unlike Lover.ly, when you click on an image in the Disney gallery, there’s no source. This is extremely frustrating for me, as a blogger, because I want photographers and vendors to get their fair credit. If I see a nice picture, I want to know who took it. If it’s Disney stock photo, that’s fine, but I still want to know. It’s also frustrating for me, in my former life as a planning bride, because often when I would see a pretty wedding picture, I would say, “OOOOH, I want to learn more about THIS wedding!” And then you click on the picture to be taken to the full blog post about the wedding. Not so much with the Disney galleries. Let’s hope Disney improves this feature.

Finally, it’s time for the main event. I went through the Dream Wedding Maker as if I was just starting to plan my wedding to test it out. I really like this new tool and I think it’s going to be great for brides and grooms, who were really left in the dark on the old DFTW website, and planners, who constantly fielded calls and emails for easy questions that will now be answered here. The most important feature of this tool is that it includes an estimated BUDGET – something that the old DFTW site was very cryptic about. It’s not going to be perfect down to the penny, but I like that DFTW is being more transparent about their costs.

Step 1 is to chose your location. Of course for this example we will be going with Disneyland. One thing I noticed is you can only use this for Wishes weddings when selecting Disneyland. I think this is because the Disneyland Escape collection is not very customizable, like it is at WDW. Also no mention of the Couture package ~~so maybe they are doing away with this~~ which I have confirmed is still available but not listed on the website at this time.

Step 2 is some basic information. Because Disney is awesome, you can select Bride & Groom, Bride & Bride, or Groom & Groom. I also noted you can select a wedding month up to 18 months in advance.

Continuing with Step 2, at the very bottom you can select a wedding budget range. Notice it won’t let you go below $12,000 so don’t even think about it!

Step 3 is to select a ceremony location.

You can click on the link for each location to get a quick overview, such as guest count and general availability, and additional photos.

Your ceremony location choices are: Brisa Courtyard, Parkview Terrace, Rose Court Garden, Sleeping Beauty Castle Forecourt, GCH Wedding Garden, and Stage 17.

Step 4 is reception location. Like with the ceremony locations, you can click on each location to get a quick overview.

The nine reception locations being offered are: Brisa Courtyard, Stage 17, Disney Animation room, Disneyland Hotel Ballrooms, Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel Ballrooms, Magic Kingdom Lawn, Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel Ballrooms, Small World mall, and Sleeping Beauty Pavilion.

Note the Small World mall is ONLY available as a reception location if you have an evening ceremony at Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

Step 5 goes over some additional details for your reception, such as food (plated or buffet), rehearsal dinner, farewell brunch, music (band or DJ), entertainment, characters, etc.

Step 6 confirms your selections, including your base price. Please note I selected a Saturday wedding and it’s giving me a base price of $12,000. According to the latest pricing information I have, this is wrong. Saturday minimums are $18,000 now, and that’s with a room block.

At the bottom of Step 6 you can click on a link to send an email to DFTW.

In order to save your Dream Wedding profile, you’ll need to sign up for an account. If you already have an account with Disney Parks (for, say, your annual passport or if you have booked a trip online, ever), you use the same email and password.

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Have you had a chance to play with the new DFTW website? What do you think? What other features would you like to see?

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Hope at Disneyland says

September 8, 2013 at 10:03 pm

So the same weekend that you debut your fancy new header, DFTW unveils their fancy new website? Hmm…coincidence? 😉

I looked at their site and it’s very nice and definitely an upgrade from their previous incarnations. I would say that I wish this version was around when I was planning, but if it was then I never would’ve sought out the community of Disney Brides that I did and I wouldn’t have made the friends or had the memories that I’ve had. So I guess thanks to DFTW for not having this when I was planning? lol

It still doesn’t give you pricing for every little thing which I think would be more helpful. IF I was a planning bride and wanted to know exactly how much EVERYTHING would cost, I would appreciate knowing what I was going into before even bothering the staff with my questions. They’re so busy over there so you would think that if they’d be more upfront online then they’d have less questions to field.

I also agree with you on the photo credit. CA doesn’t have a Disney Photographic department like FL has so if someone really loves an image from the CA weddings gallery, then they should know which photographer took the image.