I might be an engineer by trade, but I am in no means a computer science engineer. I know very little about coding, website development, JAVA, HTML…? I speak four languages but computer programming is not one of them. Mr. Wallaby is a little more tech savvy than me—last year for Halloween, we made our own costumes (see photo below): Mr. W was the new iPhone and I was the original iPod, and those are pretty accurate descriptions of our levels of ability in computing.Yet with Mr. W’s help I developed a pretty cool wedding website, and I am here to show you how.
Halloween 2011 / Personal photo
We started out by creating one of the free wedding websites on The Knot. However, a couple weeks later, I encountered this gem (and this and this and definitely this!) and grew green with envy. I LOVE typography and cool buttons on websites. However, I am not exceptionally skilled at using Photoshop or any web design program, so I decided to seek a happy medium and find another free website with a wider variety of templates than The Knot. I found some beautiful templates on Wedding Window and Wedding Jojo. I ended up going another route, though—another bee recommended building a website with flash from wix.com, so I decided to give that a try.
Wix offers hundreds (or thousands?) of free templates that are very easily customized. There are tons of features and widgets, such as guestbooks, photo mosaics, mobile sites compatible with iPhones and Androids, and even a widget that allows website viewers to send you a message to your email. I signed up, chose a template, and incorporated all of these features in just a couple hours. Here’s the result:
Our wedding website homepage / Personal photo
Guest information on our wedding website / Personal photo
Our registry information / Personal photo
Aside from those pages, we also have pages with really cool photo displays, a page that lists the order of events on The Big Day, and a page with our families’ contact information. To save paper, we are not including lengthy enclosures with our invitations. Instead we tucked in a small Moo card (more on that later!) directing our guests to the website. Hopefully our website will be a one-stop shop of useful information for our guests!
Something else pretty cool that we did while we were creating our website was we bought our own domain name. For around $6, we bought the name mrandmrswallaby.com for a year. Mr. W loves to tell people about our website: “Just go to www.mrandmrswallaby.com!” We bought the domain name from GoDaddy, and we set up the domain name to be forwarded to our Wix website. So our guests type in “www.mrandmrswallaby.com” into their browsers, and it directs them to misswallaby.wix.com/mrandmrswallaby (which was our free domain name assigned to us when we signed up for a Wix account).
Did you create a wedding website for your guests? Have you ever tried building a flash site with Wix or a similar tool?
Love it! We also included a card directing guests to our website, which had all the information they could ever need, but we still got questions about hotel blocks and where the church was from our older guests. Oh well!
So pretty! I let Mr. P handle our whole wedding website, after I picked out the template, of course 
After a lengthy search, I ended up choosing Wix for our website, as well!! It has the best customization options, by far.
I love the idea of including a card with the invitations directing guests to the website!!
1) those costumes are amazing. the ear buds, so sweet.
2) your website is gorgeous, so jealous. PBear refused to put effort into making a website. *sigh* so we have a fairly ugly site. I have to see if I can convince him to put together a real cute one.
Love this! I’ve seen wix around and it seems to have worked well for you.
Love this! Which template did you use as your base?
I don’t know if I ever heard of Wix..?! I went the Blogger route – I knew just a tiny bit of coding from tweaking my personal blog, so I carried that over to create our wedding website – I loved how I could pretty much customize everything that way!
I’ve never heard of Wix before, but it looks awesome! Thanks so much! I was trying to use Google Sites, but it just wasn’t that easy to customize certain things. I’m definitely checking this out instead.
Wix is good, but I find that the pages load really slow and it takes some technical skill to really make the site look good. Also they are not specific to weddings. My husband and I used Wedbuddy. The sites are free and easy to create. They also have some features that help with planning.
Mrs. Wallaby, Houston Age and Occupation: 24, Environmental Engineer Engagement Date: January 1, 2012 Wedding Date: November 2012 Venue: Oak Tree Manor About Me: I'm a free-spirited, adventurous girl who loves anything active, reading, traveling, cooking up new dishes for my fiancé, and working on my budding garden. My fiancé is an athletic, intellectual, animal-loving guy with an obsession with basketball and who treats me with the deepest compassion and respect. We are both engineers, and we met at our workplace. Together we complement one another and make a great team, and we are excitedly counting down the days until our outdoor wedding in Houston in November. We're planning a green wedding with lots of Persian cultural touches, and I can't wait to share all of the before-and-after details of our special day
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