Bride side groom side?

You could encourage the whole "pick a seat, not a side" thing. There's all sorts of signs that you could put up. Most people will probably just stick to the traditional sides, though, but that's not terrible. Who cares if it's lopsided! You'll only hardly be able to tell in pictures.

^^ What Future Mrs R said.

Like Future Mrs R said, you could put up a side encouraging people to not choose a side like the pictures I've included. If it does end up being lopsided your photographer should know how to crop pictures to make it look like it wasn't different at all.

You can always tell your ushers to divide people up equally, right?

Yup. Go with the "pick a seat, not a side" option.

Ty

The other thing is, if you have about 65 seats on each side, they really cant sit 100 on one side and 30 on the other.

I had them alternate as they came in it was fairly even.

We going with the pick a seat, not a side, because aside from the worry of who has more friends / family I always think its silly. My FH and I have a ton of mutual friends that we've made over the past six years and where would they sit if there were side? I aisle way?

What everyone else said, except we most likely won't do a sign, we'll just have our ushers tell guests they can sit wherever.

Or as our priest says, come on up front, plenty of room!

We are doing non-traditional seating. My mom and dad will be seated behind FH and his mom and dad will be seated behind me. Everyone else will be encouraged to mix it up. Plus if we get 80% yes, we will be close to capacity, so people will have to sit where there is a seat!

I have seen pews roped off at the back so you had to fill the front few pews. It made a small wedding look large in photos, because there were no empty seats

It doesn't matter - we kept sides separate and oddly enough it sort of looked pretty even when in fact DH had way more people at the wedding than I did (he invited a lot more).

We didn't use a sign or ushers and people were able to figure it out. they'll just sit where they want, wherever there is room. don't sweat it!

"Pick a seat, not a side!"

I agree with everyone else!

We just told our ushers that we really only cared about family members being seated on specific sides. Friends were to be spread out across the church especially since I had a lot more people coming then DH did. Plus our church doesn't have a main aisle, it has 2. So it was easier to spread people out.

I'm not having "sides".

We reserved the first two rows and then everyone just filled in behind them. As Pezzy said, our guest didn't really have a choice, because we split them equally on both sides. Ours would have been very disproportional, otherwise.

Ty