- Ceremony: None. We're planning on getting a self-uniting marriage license (PA) and having our parents serve as the witnesses
I... uh, might know some people who did a courthouse wedding before the main ceremony, and just sort of faked it during the main wedding. Some people knew, some people didn't, and it was supposedly a bunch simpler, though it was an out of state wedding. As long as it's legal and gets signed off, you're good.
- Music: If possible, will have our siblings set up an iTunes playlist rather than hiring a DJ. If that doesn't work, I have a coworker who moonlights as a DJ, I'll find out what his rates would be.
If you're planning to have dancing, and want people to actually dance, spend the money on a proper DJ. The difference between a wedding party where everyone sits around at the tables and where everyone is up dancing having a blast is often down to the DJ. I've been to weddings with good DJs, and weddings with bad or no DJs, and it's
obvious which one people have more fun at. You can offer some song suggestions and such, but... really, hire a DJ that does weddings, let them do their thing, and everyone should have a blast.
- Photography: Hoping to ask a friend of ours that does amateur photography to do the photos for us. If not, will have to do some research.
Do you care about your wedding photos? Will you care about them 30 years from now? If yes, get someone who has done wedding photography before. If not, then hire whoever.
One thing we did at ours was to get a bunch of cheap 2GB USB sticks and some padded mailers, with the proper postage and addressing back to our place. We told people, "Hey, if you take photos at the wedding, awesome. Please send us a copy on a USB stick." We got some good stuff that way.
- Flowers - Do we really need flowers?
Do you? Up to you!
- Booze - Most of the low-cost venues/caterers are BYO, so we'll need to provide the champagne and anything else we want to have available.
You've said you want dancing, which pretty much implies some basic level of alcohol service. I don't know how your state works, though.
With our wedding, it was fairly cheap (IIRC it was around $3500-4000 for the venue for about 30 people), but it was out of state (partly centered between families, mostly stuck somewhere we really liked that wasn't comically inconvenient for everyone). We pretty much told the venue what we were looking for, and went with their recommendations. We used their flower vendor, a friend of mine was the officiant, I bribed another friend to do wedding photography by paying for his travel and fishing trip out in Colorado (and tossed him some as well, but pretty much I gave him an excuse to do a week long fishing trip), and everything went very well.
One thing I'd suggest: Be very clear, up front, on who is paying for stuff. I don't know how your families are with regards to weddings, but since we were paying for ours pretty much entirely out of pocket, any suggestions of "Oh, you have to have..." were met with a "Great, are you paying for that?" :) It wasn't a big deal, but I've heard it can get out of hand if other people get to offer suggestions without being told that they're on the hook for the costs.
No clue what your husband does, but I know a lot of people have been moving to the silicone bands for a "daily wear" band as opposed to a metal band. I don't wear my (tungsten carbide) wedding band because I work with battery packs, and a couple hundred amps through a wedding ring is the sort of excitement I don't need. Ever. I keep meaning to order one of the silicone ones, just haven't gotten around to it yet.