Wedding Blog

*Co-blogged with my on-call webmaster, who will also be marrying me come June.

As was the case with Save the Dates… I was anti-wedding website. I thought they were uber cheesy. However, I took a moment to consider how I tend to lose things like invitations. I also realized that with all our out-of-towners… they might appreciate help locating fun Chicago activities, and places to go out so that they can make a mini-vacay out of their visit. I ALSO realized that large portions of our families have never ever met, so a website might be a good way for them to somewhat get to know each other.

SO, another wedding project was born!

Our website took about TWO MONTHS to birth! I could not believe how much work this was to put together. I thought I could knock it out in an afternoon - oh, how much I have learned! However, I do have to say that I took much more time with the pages in the very beginning… by the end of the process the words, “Oh, that’ll do” came out of my mouth… every other second. Here are a few tips from Mr. Snappy-Webmaster that might help other brides about to embark on this great adventure (and much like embossing, it IS an adventure!)

1. No picture shown on the internet needs to be of higher resolution than 96 pixels - otherwise your site will load really slowly.
The easiest way to check the resolution on photos you intend to upload is to view the photo in Photoshop or even in Paint…. then click “Image”… then click “Attributes.” If the resolution says 96×96 dots per inch, you’re good. Too far below this, and your pic may look not-so-awesome. Too far ABOVE this, and your page will… l-o-a-d….s-l-o-w-lyyyyyy. Yuck.

If you need to downgrade your resolution to make the page load more quickly, view the photo in whatever Picture Manager program you have on your computer. When the image is on the screen, press the “print screen” button on your keyboard. Then open the Paint program on your computer and press “paste” under the Edit menu. After this, crop the desired image by selecting the actual photo edges and moving the cutout to the upper left hand side of the screen. THEN go into “Image” and then “Attributes” to finish the crop. Save! Then you can add the newly adjusted photo to your website.

2. Redirects are your friend.
Many brides and grooms want to use their own domain name, say… www.ralphandlaurenforeva.com. To do this, you can either pay someone to be your webdesigner…. or you can just do a redirect! For us, this was more out of necessity than anything else. The particular website creator we used was great because we could use an existing template, and they had a Chicago-centric design we LOVED. What we discovered, after countless hours of work, was that our guests had to type the “http://” before the website name in order to successfully get to our page… who does that anymore? ANSWER: NO ONE - everyone just types addresses starting with “www.” Big problemo. Our solution was a redirect - because I was too lazy to redo all my work.

A redirect is when you purchase your own domain name and then instruct it to open another website automatically. Sound complicated? It’s actually not, and you can do it yourself. The web service we liked the best was GoDaddy.com… yes, GoDaddy.com, the company with the crazy Superbowl ads! Totally serious. Once you purchase your domain name (follow the instructions on their site) for as little as $6, you will be given the option to “redirect.” Say YES. The web service (GoDaddy, in our case) will ask you for the website you would like to redirect to. Once you have given the company your redirect address, it will take about 24 hours to be up and running. Sometimes the redirect is ready within only a few hours, but it can take awhile, so just be patient.

3. Masks are not just for Halloween anymore.
Another cool thing you can do is that once the redirect is up and running, the new domain name stays in the Web Address bar. This is called “masking.” So whatever domain name you purchase from GoDaddy or a comparable service will be the web address that you give your guests AND it will be the address they see in their internet browser, no matter what. The best part is that you don’t have to do ANYTHING to make this happen - it’s an automatic part of using the redirect.

4. Consider using a website password that only your guests will have.
To state the obvious, people you might never expect run across things like blogs and personal websites. Although a password is never foolproof, it will help cut down on anonymous traffic on your site.

Whew, that was a lot! Next time… all the fun things you can do when you create your own site!

Anybody else have any helpful tips for putting together a wedding website?

(image source)