Weddingbee Blog

(Alternative title: Nothing we do is ever simple.)

Way back when we first began thinking up our Helvetian invites, we knew that we wanted to include a wedding website with an RSVP option. And almost as soon as I was engaged, one of my first wedding resources was The Knot, which has that handy free website function built in. I asked Mr. Funnel Cake if it was OK to have the wedding website be English only since this was the free option.

FC agreed that this was a good idea under the condition that we buy a custom URL because he didn’t want our wedding website to be http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/MissFunnelCakeandMrFunnelCake, and I don’t blame him. I bought a custom domain from Godaddy and the wedding website was dunzo. Or so I thought…

(Because you knew that part was coming!) When we were well into the process of finalising the invite design, the website came up again a lil’ something like this:

Mr. Funnel Cake: What are we doing for the wedding website?

Me: We’re using the free site on The Knot, remember?

Mr. Funnel Cake: WHAT? Nooo! We have to have the website in German and Portuguese too! We can’t have just English!

Me: … What?? You tell me this NOW?!

Jap, Mr. Funnel Cake totally reneged his website decision and frantically started searching for dual and trilingual wedding websites, much to my horror and aggravation because of the time pressure to get the invites out. (Coincidentally, the time pressure was from Mr. FC wanting to get the invites out in June, five months before the wedding!)

Y’all, pre-existing trilingual wedding websites DON’T EXIST.

Don’t even bother searching if you have three languages. (OK fine, search.) The very best we found was a pay site that would let you customise a website in two languages. But for 50 or 100 or however much it cost, it didn’t fit the bill. This meant I’d have to make our website.

AHHHHHH.

(Source)

You guys, I’m a graphic designer, but I am not a web designer. The web with all its fancy HTML, PHP, CSS and whatnot scares me to my inner design core. So I did what any bride should and ran to Weddingbee to search for DIY websites.

I stumbled upon Mrs. Cupcake’s guide to iWeb and basically followed it to a tee, except for the addition of an RSVP function where I used JotForm to create a form for people to fill out and submit. (Oh and I triplicated the site into three languages and made a home page for language selection. Ha!)

I did run into some trouble formatting things with Mrs. Cupcake’s guide because it doesn’t mention that you have to have a MobileMe (soon iCloud) account in order to make all of the iWeb functions work seamlessly. Basically if you don’t have your website hosted with Apple, you cannot do Mrs. Cupcake’s fake guest book trick. Thanks for nothing Apple!

Originally I was building the website using my own hosting that I already owned, but when I ran into a lot of trouble with getting the guest book to work, I caved and bought a MobileMe account to make things easier. (Exactly what Apple wanted me to do!) But Mr. Funnel Cake’s parents left us a really sweet message with a picture of Mr. FC from when he was in school on the site, so I think it was all worth it in the end. And as an added bonus, we are using the MobileMe account as a place where wedding guests can upload photos after the wedding.

So while Mr. Funnel Cake was away one Friday evening in April for a Polterabend, I cranked this baby out. He was surprised that I was still up at 4AM when he arrived home, but I wanted to get this thing DONE. I translated most of the site into German myself, but I am pitiful at Portuguese, so Mr. Funnel Cake had to take care of that. After a few more changes and some edits here and there, the website was pretty much done.

Sooo finally I am unveiling my masterpiece to you…

Guests are greeted with language selection on the home page.

From there they are taken to the home screen complete with day ticker. Look how many days left! (Freak out time!)

The “About Us” section was meant to tell our families who might not know the other person that well a little bit more about ourselves.

The story of how we met.

Mr. Funnel Cake cracked up when I translated this into Portuguese with Google Translate on the bridal party page. “Maid of Honor” was translated as “Cleaning Maid.” Oops! FC fixed that one for me, but not before laughing to tears first.

We included pages for our ceremony and reception and I integrated Google maps using the iWeb html widget. Super easy!

I went to JotForm to make the form for our website. I could specify all the questions and answers for our RSVP form and then JotForm would give me the code to paste it into the iWeb widget. I did this in each language and JotForm would email us with people’s responses as they came in. It was very handy!

I did get that guest book to work and by now both the German and English ones have been written in. Success!

…yeah… you totally wanted to see a close up of Mr. Funnel Cake’s school picture, didn’t you? Isn’t he precious? He’s going to kill me if he ever finds out I put this on the internet.

Mr. Funnel Cake really liked the site and he was so appreciative that I helped him put together something in all three languages so we could reach out to all his family. I was happy to have a great excuse to use a bunch of our engagement photos. We got a lot of great feedback on the site even though the web coding is kind of lame and makes you reload the same images over and over for each different page on the site. (Thanks again Apple!)

Did you make a website? If you’ve got any great multi-lingual resources, don’t hesitate to share them for the brides still working on their websites!

*All pictures are personal unless noted.*