Weddingbee Blog

Back when Mrs. Corn was still a single stalk, she wrote about hosting a wedding website on Blogger. Well, I took the Corn Challenge, and I thought I’d share some of the fun stuff I did to personalize our site:

These are the header and footer I knocked together to represent our Sweetest Type of Love theme. I also gave the site a cute matching favicon (like the bee in Weddingbee’s URL):

The whole reason we’re using a Blogger-based site is to have custom details such as these. I just didn’t want to be boxed in to one of the boilerplate templates that I kept seeing on the regular wedding websites - “Romantic”, “Coastal”, “Retro”… - especially since our wedding has (I hope!) a unique theme. I saw the website as an opportunity to help pull this whole aesthetic together. Plus, I wanted to be able to make an unlimited amount of pages.

I purchased a short, memorable domain for a whopping $9 from Go Daddy. I called them and they walked me through redirecting the blogspot URL to the new domain. In five minutes, our web address went from http://website.blogspot.com to the much simpler www.website.com - short and sweet for printing on our save-the-dates.

From there, I was able to turn our website into a veritable Easter egg hunt: pages within pages, and all kinds of funny stuff to show a bit of my personality to that 53% of our guests who’ve never met me.

There’s the “Sweet Peeks” page, where I’ve posted tiny portions of photos of things from our wedding such as my dress, our cake toppers, etc., as well as our first dance song (stolen without remorse from The Monkeys):

I also planted hints as to what the images are in the image files, so that mousing over them gives readers a “pop-up” clue.

There’s the recipe for a Peach Blossom, which is the cocktail I was drinking the night I met Mr. Lovebug:

The joke about French Stewart is explained on the “Timeline” page - a list of significant events leading up to our engagement. This little “extra” is found on that page.

In order to make the website as little blog-like as possible, I removed the “Next Page” and “Previous Page” links, disabled date, time, and comments on posts, took out the navigation bar, and set the blog to one post per page. By setting the publish date of every other page to an earlier time, you can keep the home page front and center no matter how many pages you add.

Each of the pages opens within the blog (as opposed to opening a new page), and guests can navigate the site by clicking on the left-hand column of links. There are all the same pages that a regular wedding website has (”About”, “Accommodations”, “Registry”, “Contact Us” and so on), and it has the same basic layout as those sites:

But by using Blogger as a wedding website, you can also add all kinds of other, non-standard (read: fun) stuff, as well. There’s really no limit to the information and links that you can put in: a page explaining what a honeymoon registry is, a guideline for guests wanting to know how formal to dress…

…we even added a “Reject File” page with funny photos of things we considered including in the wedding, but ultimately rejected:

I also played with the tint of several of our engagement photos, fading the color so they’d have a more vintage look and match the palette of the site:

Of course, there are drawbacks to hosting a wedding website on Blogger:

- You can’t have a song playing throughout the site, though you can install a player for guests to hear a tune on one page.
- There’s no way to really have a guest book, unless you want to enable comments on every post (thus making it look like a blog); instead, I added a fun link for readers to send a send an owl à la Harry Potter.
- There’s no RSVP tracking, such as some websites offer. You can, however, see what cities your readers are logging on from with Google Analytics.
- Tech support is limited to Blogger’s help pages, though Go Daddy offers help with setting up your URL, if you need it.

But for unlimited, cheap creativity and customization, it’s great. Especially for those of us who can’t write code or do web design. I’m not a Gocco girl, so this was my DIY project. In fact, everything I did I learned in one of two places: Tips for New Bloggers and Blogger Buster. And while other bloggers might recognize the format, non-bloggers probably won’t know the difference.

Here are some links to easy tutorials of the tricks I used to de-blog and personalize our website, in case anyone thinks they might like to try it:

removing the navbar
adding a favicon
making “drop caps” (to make the first letter of a post oversized)
adjusting margins
replacing the header with an image of your own
adding a custom footer
removing the “older post” and “newer post” links
adding music

Anyone else have tips for injecting some personality into a wedding website, Blogger-based or otherwise?