Weddingbee Blog

I had big dreams of designing a wedding website from scratch, hopeful it’d turn out as unique and fabulous as Mrs. Pin Cushion’s site, but alas, my techy skills fled me yet again, and I was left searching the ho-hum templates found on The Knot, Wedding Wire, and Wedding Window. (No offense to brides using these sites—they’re fab for those who want a template to fill in!).

I started a trial over at Wedding Window, but as soon as I began uploading pictures, I got discouraged. Each picture I tried to add had to be a certain size to fit into the pre-set picture templates, and nothing was looking the way I imagined. Ugh.

Finally, around the one-year mark, I figured I better settle on something. For the life of me, I cannot remember how I stumbled upon it, but I found a wedding-website host that I had never heard of, and I loved it immediately: www.wedmedo.com.

I haven’t been to a lot of weddings so I might be the minority here, but I haven’t seen many wedding websites with Flash Player. I loved it, though. The templates are unbelievable! They look so sophisticated and modern. They really showcase all of the photos on the wesbite, too, which I love!

I signed up for a trial almost immediately, and that night I pretty much finished our website. I got so carried away with everything, and it was coming together nicely. Of course, I had to go back later after we actually signed up and tweak a lot of things, but that initial energy I had testing out the site let me know this was the one.

Introduction:

This introduction is the number one reason I chose to have our website through wedmedo.com. It’s hard to describe exactly how it looks, but it’s pretty cool! The Flash chops up the main picture, which you see below, into checkers, then the actual picture appears, along with the welcome message, which says our names and the date of our wedding. —> LOVE IT!

It’s a lot like this sample video but looks a little something like this:

Main Page:

Some people might think it’s weird that I used a picture of the backs of our heads for the main page, but I thought it was cute. I tried a lot of our other engagement pictures, and nothing was working for me. We’ve used these pictures a lot over the last year, and I didn’t want to put something up that we’d already shown everyone.

I also liked the fact that this picture matches the one in our introduction and it fits perfectly with the song that plays. (Yes! There’s music, too! You can choose from three songs offered or upload your own music.)

Menu:

This menu is really easy to use, which is good. I like how you can jump around to whatever page you want and you can see everything we have our on site at one glance. Perfect!

Backgrounds:

I used pictures I took of our venue as the background on each page. At first I was a little worried that it would spoil the surprise (the surprise being our gorgeous venue), but I think it’s cool that we’re giving guests a sneak peek of what’s to come! Here’s an example of one of the pages:

I didn’t just use pictures of the outside of our venue, either. I used pictures of the manor itself and some of the rooms inside. I thought it fitting to use a photo of the bridal suite for the “About the Bride” page. I absolutely LOVE this room, and this gives people a peek at it since not everyone will see it on our wedding day! You can kind of see the picture of me appearing here (on the left), too. I love the Flash effects:

Welcome:

This is one of my favorite pages! I designed and redesigned a lot of the pages on our website and was really fickle about what pictures to use and what to write, but everything on this page came out perfectly on the first try! I still love the way it looks, which is unusual because I’m the first person to change her mind about something.

I hope the sky is this blue on our big day!

Ceremony & Reception Information page:

This page was super easy! Since our ceremony and reception are at the same location, I really only needed to include the time. Choosing the picture was kind of difficult, but I really like the one I ended up with.

RSVP Form:

We got an RSVP already! Woohoo! BM Shareta reviewed the website for me before we sent our save the dates to look for misspelled words, etc., and she got right onboard signing our guest book and sending an RSVP! It was so exciting to get an e-mail notification that someone had actually RSVP’d to the wedding. I can’t wait to receive more!

About the Groom:

This is my favorite page because Mr. B isn’t a writer like me. It takes a lot for him to write a paragraph or a couple of pages about anything, but when he does it blows me away! I always have to write, edit, write, edit, and he just writes it once perfectly on the first try, conveying exactly the message he wants. (I’m so jealous!) I really enjoyed reading the way he described himself and his interests. He did a great job!

FAQs:

I actually got the idea for a FAQs page from Miss Sloth! I think it’s going to be REALLY helpful to our guests, answering questions about kids, attire, parking, etc. I’m really glad we added this and think folks will appreciate it. Also, you can see that for pages with more words than pictures, I used sunset (or plain green) backgrounds, which makes reading the text a lot easier:

The Wedding Party:

The pictures for these pages were kind of difficult to insert because they needed to be small. I used www.picnik.com to resize and crop the pictures I wanted to use, and that worked out pretty well.

Unfortunately, only half of our wedding party is posted. Mr. B doesn’t think the guys will miss having their pictures and bios included. While I might beg to differ, they’re his friends and ultimately his choice. It’s not something I could have written for him, and who knows? There’s a chance Mr. B will get around to it sooner or later. I’m just glad my part is done! The ladies will love reading theirs.

One of my besties, BM Ghadeer:

There’s also Gift Registry, Accommodations, Directions, and Photo Album pages.

Overall, I have to admit that our website was A LOT more work than I had anticipated. There was just so much information to include and so many pictures to upload that it’s taken me awhile to get to a place where I’m happy with it.

I even hesitated sending our save the dates for a few weeks because I was rushing to finish it up. Mr. B thought I was nuts! He kept saying, “You worked so hard on the save the dates! It’s time to show them off!” I wanted our website to be perfect, though, before people saw it, and my thought was they’ll probably only see it ONCE—on the day they get their save the date (unless they check back right before the wedding for something).

Guess what happened? I freaked for nothing. Hardly anyone has visited the site.

Although, Mr. B’s mom did, and her reaction was worth all the hard work and fuss! She sent me an e-mail that read: “I LOVE THE WEBSITE!” In all caps, just like that, which she never does. I knew she was proud. When we talked, she gushed abut how wonderful I did and how she had never seen anything like it. Thank God I have a saint for a FMIL. Otherwise, I might shoot myself for obsessing over nothing. Maybe I’ll get some other (late) reactions?

What website did you use? Was it a lot of work? What kind of reaction did you get?