Weddingbee Blog

Step 3: Budget

You need to figure out how much a wedding wedsite is worth to you. $ 10? $ 100? $ 1,000? Remember that, unless you use the completely free option offered by some sites, you will have to pay something - even only the domain and the hosting of the site. See step 5 for more details.

Step 4: Feature wish list

What do you want to use your wedsite for? Which features should it include? How do you want your guests to use it? It’s useful to decide upfront what the wedsite must include! Some features might be:

• Interactive guestbook and comments
• A blog section
• Gift or travel registry
• Online RSVP
• Password Protection
• Photo Upload
• Multi-language
• Custom polls

For example, we want our guests to mail their RSVP so we did not include that on the wedsite to minimize confusion. But we do have a blog section, multi-language, password protection, a multilevel menu and a weather application! You can see some of those features in one of the internal pages:

Step 5: From scratch, ready-to-go or custom design?

There are several options available for creating a wedsite. You could choose to create one from scratch, purchase an already made template which you can then personalize or pay a web designer to create the site for you. Your budget and desired feature list will help you identify the best option for you.

• From Scratch: the best free tool to create a simple website is WordPress.org. It provides a really good CMS software and numerous open source free plugins to add great features to your website. However to use it’s full potential it’s good to have some technical skills (Mr. Caro setup our site, I personally would have not been able to).
• Ready to go: Many companies offer already made wedding wedsites which simply need to be customized. There are both free and paid options: the difference between the two is that the free ones require you to create your site as a sub-domain to theirs (for example www.weddingwire.com/yourname/). These are, in my opinion, the best options.
  Best free websites: Project Wedding, Blogger, Google Sites, WordPress.com, TheKnot, eWedding, Wedding Mapper andWedding Wire.
  Best paid websites: Wedquarters, Wedding Window, Wedding JoJo.
• Custom design: A talented web-web designerweb designer / developer can make your vision come to life and create a truly awesome wedsite. I was lucky enough to have Mr. Caro create our wedsite: if he’d done it on commission he would have probably asked about $ 800 for it! But the end results can be truly amazing: I love our wedsite and think it’s one of a kind. Another great custom wedsite I saw was created by designer Mara Taber: http://ithappensthisspring.com.

You can find here a great WordPress.com tutorial and here a great Blogger tutorial! Important: if you want your own domain name, for example yourname.com instead of yourname.wordpress.com, you will need to purchase it!

Step 6: Communication

So now you have gotten your wedsite up and running. How do you communicate it to your guests?

There are several ways of course: a mailing, Facebook, word of mouth… We chose to include the website URL on our save the dates (with the password of course) and that decision was a major success—everyone loved it! Unfortunately this meant that we sent our save the dates later than expected, as it took us quite a bit to finish the website (see Step 2). If you are on a tight schedule make sure you keep it simple!

Step 7: Future development

Will you still want your wedding wedsite up and running after the wedding? What will you use it for? Will having it on CD be enough?

We decided that we wanted to add a “Photo Upload” feature immediately after the wedding, where our guests could all upload the pictures of the wedding. Hopefully if everyone does that we will have all the pictures stored in one place! We also decided that we want to keep the site up and running as it might evolve in the future as our life together evolves (I think it’s always useful to have a password protected personal site that only close friends and family have access to!).

Step 8: Ready, set, go!

I hope this post was useful in clarifying which solution is right for you and in giving you some good resources to start from!

Will you have a wedsite? Which is your favorite option or which one did you choose?