Announcing to the world that you are now the happy Mr. and Mrs. is an important part of your new life together. Since it is virtually impossible to invite all your friends, family members, co-workers, ex-school pals and casual acquaintances to your big day, sending out wedding announcements allows you to recognize their importance in your life and allows you to stay on budget with regards to the wedding.

They are also very popular for couples that elope or couples that have very small wedding ceremonies. In some cases couples that marry out of the country or travel for their wedding may not be able to invite a lot of guests along, so sending a wedding announcement when you return home helps everyone feel involved in the celebration.

Wedding announcements are structured to provide the recipient with the basic information about your wedding as well as details that you want to include. In most cases the wedding announcement will be in the theme of the wedding, perhaps even featuring a picture of the happy couple or even a picture of the wedding party. Of course these are not provided to guests that have attended the event, those individuals will either receive thank you cards for gifts or thanks for attending the ceremony cards.

Like wedding invitations, choosing a wedding announcement is an important consideration for the couple. Many couples select ones that are very similar in style to the wedding invitation except they announce that the event has already happened. The colors, font, text and style of the wedding announcement can be formal, casual or celebratory, just depending on the message and style the couple prefers. These cards do need to clearly indicate they are an announcement and not an invitation that somehow got waylaid in the mail.

Typically most announcements will clearly indicate that they are announcing the marriage of the couple, plus will include the date and location of the wedding. They may also provide information on where the new couple is residing or an email address or phone number if any of this information has changed.

Wedding announcements may be sent by the couple themselves, or of course the proud parents of the bride or groom or both sets of parents can send them. When parents are sending the announcements they will need to be coordinated so that some people don't get announcements from both sets of parents. This can be easily handled by one person collecting the lists from both sides of the family and coordinating the distribution of the announcements. Typically the bride and groom will also need to be involved as parents are not likely to know all their friends, coworkers and business associates to include.

Sending wedding announcements is a nice way to inform those that were not invited to the wedding about the event. It is much more personal than just sending an email, plus it continues to recognize their importance in your life. In cases where you had a small wedding, out of town wedding or a wedding that had very limited space, you may want to include a short statement of some type in the card to this effect. While people may already be aware of your wedding, many may not and this will be a pleasant surprise that won't cause them to wonder why they didn't receive an invitation.

People do understand that smaller weddings are more common or that you were getting married on a cruise and couldn't invite a lot of guests. Some people that receive them may decide to send a gift, however it is never expected that those getting an announcement should feel obligated to send a gift.