I encourage my couples to keep the seating of their guests close to them during the ceremony, no more than six to eight feet from the couple to the first row. Closeness gives a strong sense of family and invitation. Too much distance means guests will neither hear your words nor see what you’re doing. Two very big black marks against your ceremony.

The graphic at left illustrates a standard arrangement of chairs for a wedding ceremony. This arrangement closely resembles the use of church pews.

You can improve on this..
 
 
 
 

User Friendly . My ceremonies are optimized at all levels. I use stage and theatric principals to design them, they are extremely photogenic, and they are fine tuned to meet the needs of the audience. This is to say that your guests will see, hear, and be eminently entertained by your ceremony. Seating therefore, can be used to enhance this effective-ness, as I encourage, or it can be used to detract from it, as shown below. My ceremonies place the bridal party before the venue's most aesthetic background. The guests and photographers will have full view of the bride and groom and their bridal party as placed within the best visual setting the venue has to offer. Every seat is a good seat at your wedding ceremony!

In most ceremonies, seats are placed in rows (like pews) as shown at left. We can improve on this by removing the first two seats of the first row, and the first seat of the second row. See now how the hard right angles are removed. Furthermore, this openness creates a 'virtual stage', by which the couple will gracefully maneuver in as when giving roses etc. to their moms and/or vips. Photographers and videographers find it much easier to position themselves in this open area as well, without crowding the bride and groom.
We can optimize seating further if you like by canting the seats toward you. The second graphic shows how the seats are angled toward the bride and groom as well as having the corner seats removed. This means the guests are more comfortable watching your ceremony as they are not looking over their shoulders at it. This seating arrangement is called chevron. You could also arrange the seating in gentle curves or arcs around you. Seating in this arrangement is called amphitheater and it is used in the photo at the top of this page.
From time to time a couple will ask if putting the guests around them in a circle is a good idea? It isn't, and for a number of critical reasons: Seating in this format has been called a ceremony in the round. The bride and groom stand in the center of their guests facing each other. Bridal party members stand in the aisles. Though some would give a high mark for its novelty, novelty must bring function which this arrangement of seats does not. It actually hurts your ceremony. Ceremonies in the round reintroduce the problems that facing forward has remedied- namely that couples are once again turning their backs on their guests (and speaking away from them as well). A ceremony in the round makes the bride and groom the absolute focal point of the ceremony and ignores the venue's best aesthetic background. True, half will see this background when seated, but the other half will have their backs to it, (creating both good seats and bad seats at your wedding ceremony). A ceremony in the round might be a good choice for a featureless environment, like the surface of the moon, but most couples pay a premium to have their ceremonies in picturesque locations- all of which is ignored by this arrangement. For these reasons, I do not, and will not, perform my ceremonies in this format.