Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be

Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be

October 30th, 2010 @ 2:40 pm by Ms Cheetah
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Alternate title: I Decide to Build Our Wedding Website.

There are plenty of websites that provide easy, nice-looking templates for your own wedding website; they range from very customizable to fairly basic. (Check out Miss Panther’s post here for more info.) Many have fees and costs involved (often in the $25–100+ range), but there are also free ones out there such as eWedding and WeddingChannel. Yet, I decided that free and easy was too good for me. I wanted a challenge! So I decided to build our own wedding website. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted it to be completely custom, and 2) I wanted to learn how to make my own website. Armed with Dreamweaver CS4 and this book, I set to work.

Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be : wedding palm springs resources Book

source

Since I am new to this, I decided to keep the design fairly simple. This is what you first see when you type in the URL:

Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be : wedding palm springs resources Website

That’s the illustration from our save the dates! (personal image)

Here is the home page:

personal image

The banner and left-side menu are on every page, which I set up as a Dreamweaver template. I included a lot of travel info for our guests and a FAQ section where we mention dress codes and average temperatures, and I even let our guests know that we are both keeping our names. I may have gone overboard with the photo section. Currently there are 12 pages of photos, and I keep adding more…somebody keep me away from my scanner.

Here are some things you should know if you plan to build your own wedding website:

It’s not free. I had to pay for a domain name and for web hosting. I used godaddy.com.
It takes time, especially if this is new to you.
You will get frustrated, especially if this is new to you.

Why I’m glad I did it:

Free rein over the design.
We were able to easily include any information we wanted (lots of sections on traveling to Palm Springs) and omit anything we didn’t want (guestbook and online RSVPs, which I know some people love, but I’m a snail-mail lady).
It was a great learning process (and it is still a learning process).
We ended up with an easy and personalized URL address.

Do you have a wedding website? Did you use an online template or build it yourself?

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8 Responses to “Making Things Harder Than They Need to Be”

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MrTapenade (message) 5 posts, Newbee

Cool! Good for you for takin’ it on yourself. We tried a couple of the hosted wedding sites first but were unsatisfied with the templates, etc., and thought we could do better on our own. Here’s what we did …

My wife and I both already had WordPress-powered blogs, and we thought we could adapt one of the thousands of WordPress blog themes to a wedding site. Sure enough, there was a good theme that we found, so we decided to build off that.

We already had a wedding site URL registered on our webhost, Dreamhost. Dreamhost offers what it calls “one-click installs” — so you can go in the admin panels and tell it that you want to host a WordPress blog on YOUR-URL.com and it sets it up for you.

From there, you can just pick a theme and build on it, especially if you know even just basic CSS.

The way to get around having it look like a blog is to go into the blog settings and find the control for the default page that your site opens to. You can either have it open as a blog, with multiple entries in ascending chronological order … or, what we did, we set it so it opened on our “About” page, which had all the links to everything.

We figured we didn’t need anything too fancy — just Travel, How-We-Met story, Accommodations, Venue, etc….

10/30/10 @ 2:59 pm (reply)

Member

CaligirlSM (message) 182 posts, Blushing bee

This looks great! Do you have this password protected? I’m wondering because when we start our site, whether we create it ourselves or use one that is already set up, I want to be able to have this option.

10/31/10 @ 2:56 pm (reply)

Bee

Mrs. Starfish (message) 1,924 posts, Buzzing bee

Wow thats awesome!

10/31/10 @ 3:42 pm (reply)

Member

jordynrose (message) 6,351 posts, Bee Keeper

Great website! We just used a fill in the blank one from Weddingwire. That was one detail I really didn’t care too much about because I knew there was no way I could design one myself.

10/31/10 @ 4:53 pm (reply)

Member

NotYourTypicalBride (message) 1,294 posts, Bumble bee

Very nice! I created our site on http://www.OneWed.com. They offered a template I liked, their site builder is extremely easy to use, and I was able to completely customize the pages I wanted (add pages/delete pages/create a page from scratch with different types of content).

The basic website is free, but I paid a nominal amount to buy a custom domain name. I even needed help at one point, and I received a friendly and prompt reply to my email.

@CaligirlSM: OneWed gives you the option to add password protection, too.

10/31/10 @ 11:08 pm (reply)

Bee

Ms Cheetah (message) 1,188 posts, Bumble bee

@CaligirlSM: I’m pretty sure that is something you can set up.

10/31/10 @ 11:17 pm (reply)

Member

ktisthatbees (message) 2,742 posts, Sugar bee

ahhh, you are much braver than I, I would love to build our own custom website. Seeing as how I am code illiterate, i’m sticking to the pre-made stuff

11/2/10 @ 1:31 pm (reply)

Member

future_mrsjones (message) 23 posts, Newbee

I’m building my own… but I’ve had experience as a Front-End Web Developer; not my job, just a hobby… Mr. Jones is the true Web Geek in our duo

I’m all about personalizations and not a big fan of templates (or anything that I can’t make my own). However, the Dreamweaver templates are solid; although I’d highly recommend to anyone to upgrade to Dreamweaver CS5 since within the last year there have been a slew a changes with HTML5 and CSS3 and CS4 is a bit outdated.

1/14/11 @ 8:27 am (reply)