The morning of her wedding, Jackelyn Skudra awoke to devastating news. Her 7-month pregnant sister was experiencing contractions and doctors would not allow her to leave the hospital.

“Charlotte is my best friend. She was supposed to be my maid of honour. It was devastating,” she recalls.

Skudra’s brother-in-law and a family friend sprang into action, trying to find a way for Charlotte to be there in some form.

Without Skudra’s knowledge — no one wanted to get her hopes up in case it didn’t work — the men hooked into wireless connections at both the hospital and the ceremony site, then rigged laptops and webcams at both ends.

“When it was time to walk down the aisle, I still had no idea what was happening. I started to cry and people thought I was just excited to be getting married, and I was of course, but I was actually extremely sad that my sister wasn’t there,” says Skudra, now 28. “After all these years of planning each other’s wedding — I was her maid of honour; she was supposed to be mine — and now she wasn’t even going to see it.”

But as soon as the “I Dos” were said and the couple was announced, Skudra spun around to the audience and noticed her sister’s smiling face beaming from a laptop in the front row.

“It was wonderful. I just broke down,” Skudra says.

Using Skype, Charlotte got to be there for the whole day, from the ceremony to the reception to the speeches. It obviously wasn’t perfect but, for Skudra, it was more than she could have hoped, given the circumstances. (Charlotte gave birth to a healthy baby two months later. Each sister now has two children).

Skudra’s is a story that is becoming increasingly common in the wedding industry. Brides and grooms are finding more innovative ways to incorporate websites such as Skype, Facebook and Twitter into their special day.

Danielle Andrews Sunkel, owner of The Wedding Planners, says the trend began around 2005, when couples began launching personal wedding websites and blogs.

“It expanded to social networking, like Facebook and Twitter, about two years ago, but it’s really gotten heavy just in the last year,” says Sunkel, who is also the president of the Wedding Planners Institute of Canada.

Skype is especially popular for destination weddings and small, family-only weddings, she adds.

With more than 800 million users, chances are everyone from little cousin Bobby to great-grandma Ethel is on Facebook, so Sunkel recommends her clients incorporate their wedding websites with their guests’ accounts.

“It’s a really good idea to socialize your wedding,” she explains. “The idea is you create your seating chart beforehand and you post this on your wedding website. Then all the guests can see whom they’re sitting with and you can link their social media pages so people can get to know each other beforehand. It’s a really cool new thing that’s been happening in the last year.”

Sunkel is also seeing couples use Twitter to connect with wedding professionals and other couples for advice. As of October, Twitter had an estimated 100 million users.

That’s where Mindy Howard comes in. Howard is the Seattle woman behind the popular Twitter account tweetmywedding, which has more than 21,000 followers from around the globe.

Howard launched her website and corresponding twitter account about three years ago for a friend’s wedding.

“It started mostly for my girlfriend but then I started getting a lot of followers. I found, and then (sent out), wedding-related tweets that I thought were funny, especially interesting pictures, hilarious comments from weddings, and inspiring ideas.”

The concept caught on and expanded. Now, her followers tweet questions, and experts and other couples reply with advice. She’s increasingly noticing couples using Twitter to find vendors, such as photographers. But most often, Howard thinks people just want to see what other real people are doing on their big day.

The problem, she says, is that wedding magazines set an unrealistically high bar for brides.

“People love reality and that’s what I provide. I love my wedding magazines … but the industry really stresses brides out, putting out these impossible perfect weddings that real people actually can’t pull off,” she says. “These are real weddings from real people.”

She also points out that Twitter, Facebook and Skype are cost-effective ways to share your wedding. “Because in this day and age, it can be a decision if you’re going to have a downpayment on a home or invite all 250 of your friends.”

The Wedding Present’s mainstay man David Gedge tells Maddie Gressel why obsession is the key to a long love affair

Listening to The Wedding Present’s latest album, Valentina, the ears of the uninitiated might think they’ve stumbled upon a great new underground rock outfit. But the band is no novice to the world of indie rock. In fact, they put the ‘independent’ into the indie rock business long before that term ever existed. Over the course of 20-odd years, The Wedding Present has released no less than 18 Top 40 rock singles in Britain, all the while maintaining the DIY low-profile that they cherish as a fundamental part of their identity. In fact, Valentina represents their ninth studio outing, a mere quarter of a century after their 1987 debut, George Best.

Since its inception, The Wedding Present have been famous for their fast-paced guitar rhythms and classically noisy British jangle. But arguably the band’s true trademark is frontman David Gedge’s Morrissey-esque lyrical focus on love, lust, revenge and heartbreak. It’s perhaps a legacy of his breakup with Janet Rigby, the drummer from his first band Lost Pandas, who left him for a guitarist and inadvertently helped create Gedge’s next venture, The Wedding Present – a name he says he chose because it didn’t sound like a pop group. “That may sound pretentious, but I wanted something unusual,” he says. “In retrospect, we probably could have done a bit better. Call ourselves Blur or something cool like that. We had a very long list of ideas. It’s like naming a baby because you have to live with it.”

Despite all sorts of adversity, live with it they have. And, perhaps most impressively, The Wedding Present has managed to stay strong in the face of constant lineup changes. Gedge is the band’s only original man left standing and has seen it through each of its rebuildings and rebrandings (as was the case in 2004 when his other band Cinerama changed its name to also be The Wedding Present), a longevity he puts down to his own obsessive character. “Basically, I make the band my whole life. Some people might find that a bit weird but I think that’s usually the case with bands that last a long time.”

Gedge has brought in three relatively new members around him – guitarist Patrick Alexander, bassist Pepe le Moko and drummer Charlie Layton – none of which were in the band pre-2010. “Every time we have a lineup change, it’s kind of like a rebirth or a renaissance. Take Patrick, who has a whole new set of ideas and inspirations. It doesn’t restart us as a group but it gives us that little kick that gets us to move on and keep going,” says Gedge in his humbly slurring Leeds accent.

Despite those new inspirations, Valentina – and the sound of The Wedding Present circa this year – is essentially in line with what we’ve come to expect from the band, perhaps slightly darker and more sombre, but remaining full of those spiteful, bittersweet one-liners that fans have come to rely on (such as ‘I’ve been using you all this time /I’ve realised that I don’t think I’m ever gonna leave my girlfriend for you’ from The Girl from DDR).

And, according to Gedge, if the songs are familiar, it’s because, through all the comings and goings, the songwriting process has fundamentally remained the same. “We have a classic kind of rock’n’roll line, so we’ve worked within those parameters,” he says. “There’s not much I want to change about that.” As if to prove that point, The Wedding Present is spending half their stage-time on this tour playing the 1991 album Seamonsters in full. Fans may rejoice – but it’s an odd way to celebrate a new lineup, a new album and a new era.

This fortnight, the band hit up Hong Kong for the first time since 1993, when they played in the Ko Shan Theatre. “I don’t remember much about the show, to be honest,” says Gedge. “But I remember Hong Kong being quite crazy! We had come from Japan, which we all felt was quite controlled, a bit too clean and polite, if you know what I mean. Then we went to Hong Kong and it felt like such a contrast. It was a bit livelier – and a nice escape. Is it still that way?” Well, it’s kind of same, same but different, David. We’d say much like The Wedding Present. 

The Wedding Present play Grappa’s Cellar on Thu Apr 19. Tickets: 2521 2322.