Wow, so broad. A good place to start is with the planning journals and trip reports subsections here. That's where we started and could read about others' ideas and experiences.
Another place is carrie's podcast:
http://disneyweddingpodcast.com/. She goes over basics on the weddings and she interviews couples who had Disney weddings and they say what worked and what didn't and what they would definitely do again and what they wished they could change.
People here seem to be a really good resource, but Disney weddings can be so overwhelming not just in terms of questions, but also in terms of answers. You might have more feedback with more specific questions. In addition, a lot of stuff depends on what you want.
I have read that Disney doesn't do a great job without some sort of framework from the couple about what they want. In other words, just telling Disney to create a Disney wedding will actually leave dftw kind of lost. However, disney is fantastic at creating things when the couple brings ideas to Disney. My fiancée has all these ideas and i really rely on her for that because I'm not that creative a person.
If I remember correctly, budget is a concern for you, as it is for us too. There is a thread here called share your budget and people have posted their beo's there to give an idea of what things cost. Some beo's are also in the planning journal subsection. I can tell you that we are trying to keep our costs down to be just above the minimum expenditure. We're doing Sunday morning ceremony and brunch, which puts our minimum at $12k and our food minimum at $100/person. We cut out a lot of people we wanted to invite but couldn't afford, including extended family, so our guest list is 25 instead of 80. We decided to skimp on floral and decor and go with venues that don't need a lot of either due to pre-existing theming, such as Ariel's, the attic, American adventure parlour, or Atlantic dance hall. We also want to minimize transportation costs so we intend to use mostly one way vans and only two resorts: a value and a deluxe. Finally, since the wedding pavilion cost more, we cut that too, although that wasn't hard because it's not really our style.
As for outside vendors, we struggled a bit here. We had to look at the entire wedding expenditure, not just what we paid Disney. So if we went outside photography for $2k, that would bring our actual expenditure to $14k because we still had to spend $12k at Disney. We have elected to use Disney photography, cut video, and disney floral (which hopefully won't be much because of already themed venues, and those venues require disney floral anyway), and that would cost us less money overall than using an outside vendor. We're also hoping for that Florida resident discount and possibly am additional discount for using all Disney services.
Pixie dust for you. The group here seems very supportive and is more than willing to weigh in on your posts and ideas, but it might work better when you bring something more specific. It's just really hard otherwise to say where to start.
