Weddingbee Blog

Anyone ever pronounce it de-butt? Hahahahahahahaha - I find the spelling of debut funny in a very 7th grade sort of way. I am also having flashbacks to “playing wrestling”, which is much like “playing house”, except we were pretending to be our favorite WWW wrestler. Jake the Snake, The Undertaker, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ric Flair, and Brett Hart - didn’t matter who my brother was playing, I would give him The People’s Elbow and then we’d get into trouble for roughhousing.

Anywebsite, I love the idea of the wedding website. Like Save-the-Dates, sometimes I think they’re narcissistic, but also like Save-the-Dates, they really come in handy! I reference the websites of marrying friends at several points during the planning process, especially if I’m attending the wedding from out of town. Since the majority of our guests are traveling from out of town, we considered a website to be a must.

I browsed all of the well known providers, plus a few more. I knew that we weren’t quite tech savvy enough to create one from scratch, so we went with the pre-designed ones created especially for weddings.

Here’s my list:

Wedding Tracker
Pros: Recommended by our Event Designer, Flash Designs
Cons: The themes didn’t fit the feel I was going for

Ewedding
Pros: Great designs! Starting to get close on the feel
Cons: A tad more than we wanted to spend

In fact, I almost splurged for this theme because I was getting really frustrated with the lack of neutral colors available across the board.

Wedding Window
Pros: Great designs and highly customizable
Cons: The customization takes a lot of effort and it’s a tad expensive
But check out this amazing looking site!

Wedding Website Templates
Pros: Interesting designs I hadn’t seen before
Cons: Not the best user interface and needs a lot of work

Wed Simple
Pros: A ton of features included, more neutral palette designs
Cons: Again with the price, just on the expensive side

This website helped me to easily compare a lot of options side by side:

Wedding Websites

After about 2 days of researching, penny pinching, hemming and hawing, our event designer pulled through in a big way. She suggested looking at:

My Wedding

I know what you’re thinking. I’m psychic like that. It is a terrible home page. Just move past that and click on Free Websites on the top navigation bar.

Just look at some of these amazing designs!

I found about 4 designs that also had color combinations in our palette. I didn’t feel like I was “settling” for a design that didn’t sing to me and I didn’t feel like I was handing over a lot of money (because it was no money at all!). What’s more, I didn’t sacrifice functionality. I’m still getting an RSVP tracker, music player and more extra pages than we’ll know what to do with. Really, it was the perfect solution for us.

Here’s a shot of the top half of our homepage:

For privacy’s sake, I had sloppily edited our names and date with the spray paint function in Paint. How 1999 is that? Awesome. Then I realized that our first names aren’t that private and the date would be cropped out anyhow. So you’ve been spared from my spray paint privacy massacre for the time being.

Was the wedding website important to you? Are there any other great free sites you’ve used?