Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Taco bought a URL for us a long time ago, since we already had some intermittent discussions about our “wedding website”. The logical step for those who like planning ahead (me) and those with a storied history of compulsive URL-purchasing (him), was to just buy the website and determine its content later.

To preserve that Tacolicious anonymity, note that our website includes both of our first names, separated with an n instead of and. Think rock ‘n roll vs. rock and roll.

The and version of said website is taken by people who aren’t us. It’s been taken since 2002, hence our decision to go with our n version. We don’t know them, other than what we learned by poking around their site. I suppose this makes us either garden-variety curious or total weirdos.

These two actually come up a good amount lately, since we feel compelled to tell people why it’s n and not and.
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So, I just sort of finished our wedding website.

I rushed to finish this so I could put the address on our save the dates. It’s pretty bare bones, but it has the necessary information at least!

At first I intended to use a template from one of the wedding sites, but none matched our colors or feel. Every pink template had brown as an accent and I just didn’t want to go there. As a fake communications professional, the first rule of branding is consistency. So I needed to find something with more customization but no html. I do not code.

Oh Google, thank you.

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Ever since it was decided that we would be having a pseudo destination wedding, I knew that having a wedding website would be a good idea. We would need a place to provide our guests with more than just the average amount of information. Accommodations, directions, things to do, places to go - you know, the things you’d like to know when spending a weekend away.

Originally, Cheeseburger Brother was going to design our website for us, but after we started talking about everything that I wanted to go into it, we decided to just use one of the standard wedding sites with templates. I originally checked out The Knot, but mind you this was over a year ago, and they didn’t have the updated choices that are available now. After doing a little Googling, I found this site that compares basically every wedding site provider. After checking into multiple different options, I ended up selecting Wedding Window, and I’ve been very happy with that choice.

Their templates are easy to customize (I was even able to adjust the colors to our exact palette!), and managing the pages is ridiculously easy. We were able to include all of the information that we had wanted to, and the response from our family and friends has been pretty good so far. Here are some screen shots:

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When we decided on a wedding website, we didn’t give it much thought. In fact, my MOH and I first realized we needed a website when she was helping me with the Save the Dates! There was a blank space on the magnets for a URL, and in a rush to fill it, we did a quick Google search for wedding website hosts. BAD idea. We were completely overwhelmed! There were so many options, and at first glance, everything was way too feminine to force upon Mr. Parfait and the more masculine half of the guest list.

So, we went with what I knew: Blogs! MOH and I created a new WordPress blog that would be disguised as a wedding website. It was free, fast, and super simple! Did I mention free? Here’s what we did:

1. Create a new blog, and look for a template that emphasizes separate pages. Anything with large tabs works nicely. Keep in mind that you can usually customize the colors and banners.

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Since Mr. Cola and I have lived together longer than we’ve been dating, we already have a TON of home stuff. Yeah, so what if a lot of it is from college (aka hand-me-downs and thrift store finds); it’s totally useable, and we don’t need more stuff to clutter up our already cluttered and messy kitchen.

But as I’m told, people expect, no, NEED wedding registries. Otherwise you could end up with twenty Crystal Bowls of Doom (seriously, the best wedding forum thread ever, if you have the time to read it all, you’ll be cracking up laughing!). So we started looking into doing a honeymoon registry instead. We love to travel, and will be spending about $8K on our honeymoon in Kauai, so we might as well let people give us “honeymoon memories” as gifts that we’ll actually use, instead of things that we don’t need.

However, all of the honeymoon registry sites charge around 7-10% for the service, either to you or the gift giver. Hello? Is that not crazy or what? The websites offset it by claiming it’s the same as a gift giver paying tax, but to me it seems pretty silly to charge that much.

OK, so back to the drawing board, because there’s no way we were going to allow a site to rip either us or our guests off.
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Who doesn’t love a Flash intro to a website? (Unless you’re on a slow connection, of course.)

So, I set out to try to figure out how to get one for our website. Of course, I have zero experience with Flash, but no worries—Google to the rescue! I found this super easy free Flash Slideshow Maker, and promptly downloaded it to try.

This is what pops up when you download and open the program… it really is this easy (and did I mention, FREE!):

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Right from the get-go, I knew I really wanted us to have an extensive and super informative wedding website, especially with about half our guest list being from out of town.

{ Source }

Trying to be cost conscious as usual, I looked into all the free options, like on theknot.com and the Wedding Channel, but they were so basic. Then I started looking at wedorama.com and some other sites with fees, but that would give a little more flexibility. However, none of these jumped out at me, they limited the number of pages I could have and seemed to have pretty cheesy templates. Where were the wedding website services that would just let me do what I wanted?

But alas, I found the solution:
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Anyone ever pronounce it de-butt? Hahahahahahahaha - I find the spelling of debut funny in a very 7th grade sort of way. I am also having flashbacks to “playing wrestling”, which is much like “playing house”, except we were pretending to be our favorite WWW wrestler. Jake the Snake, The Undertaker, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ric Flair, and Brett Hart - didn’t matter who my brother was playing, I would give him The People’s Elbow and then we’d get into trouble for roughhousing.

Anywebsite, I love the idea of the wedding website. Like Save-the-Dates, sometimes I think they’re narcissistic, but also like Save-the-Dates, they really come in handy! I reference the websites of marrying friends at several points during the planning process, especially if I’m attending the wedding from out of town. Since the majority of our guests are traveling from out of town, we considered a website to be a must.

I browsed all of the well known providers, plus a few more. I knew that we weren’t quite tech savvy enough to create one from scratch, so we went with the pre-designed ones created especially for weddings.

Here’s my list:
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Oh my gah… When I created our wedding website (several months ago) I thought it might be nice to put a photo up on the landing page. The photo I chose? A picture of ys on a nice, sunny fall day at a wine festival.

Do you see anything strange?

No?
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I know it’s been a while, and I promised you guys I’d share a few more of my projects. I’ve just recently (in the past month or so) been able to start reading about weddings again without getting all misty-eyed and, since this would have been our wedding weekend, I thought I would share one of the first projects that I did: our wedding website.

I actually started on our wedding website before the proposal (shh…), mainly because I wanted to make sure our domain name was available.

The main page of the site gave our guests some basic things that they could do. This included giving them instructions on where they could learn “Thriller” or what hotel to book rooms at.

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One of our biggest DIY projects to date has been the creation of our wedding website—and to think, I almost forgot to blog about it! A website was important for us since it will be a ’destination wedding’ for roughly 90% of our guests. The pre-made wedding templates just really weren’t cutting it for us. I think I searched them all, and they just didn’t feel ’us’ - so, in true Glossy fashion, we made our own!

The concept of our website came from my wedding planning notebook. I have a small black moleskin notebook that I carry everywhere with me (because who knows when wedding inspiration will hit!). It’s small enough that I can carry it all the time and barely know it’s there, and it holds all my random wedding thoughts, vendor contacts, and everything else, from the guest list, to the style of the b’maid dresses.

Using a ’notebook’ concept as the basis of our design, we came up with this as our intro page:

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So Mr. Joey and I went back and forth about a wedding website for a long time. While we liked having a central place for travel suggestions and wedding information, he was not too excited to have his information in a searchable place.

Mr. Joey has some devoted but nosey students. It’s the reason he doesn’t have a Facebook or MySpace account, and the reason he’ll never tell them my last name (it’s pretty unique). He’s OK with a blog where his name wouldn’t be in searchable text, but he’s not OK with a website designed to give out info about us and our relationship that his students could find.

Yes, it seems a little crazy, until you have 3 students show up at your apartment one Sunday afternoon. Yes, it really happened. He teaches at a small private school, so keeping info from the kids can be hard. We’ve even had a few kids threaten to crash the wedding. Luckily, it’s in the summer when no kid wants to be at school (the ceremony is at the school chapel) and few other teachers who are invited have sworn themselves to secrecy.

So what to do about sharing info? Local guests are easy. They don’t need travel info, and essentially everything they need to know is on the invitations. Out-of-town guests need travel info and suggestions for visiting the city. What to do?

Well, I came up with an idea I stole from the back of Blueprint Magazine (R.I.P.).
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I love wedding websites. I love to read about the couple’s story, learn about their wedding plans and look through their pictures. I will often check back for updates and send emails to the couple. I even let the wedding song on the site run over and over again in a loop… and will not press pause or stop. I realize that I am probably (definitely) in the minority. I think I especially love wedding websites because they give you an idea of the couple’s style and provides you with a glimpse into their relationship. I couldn’t wait to get the Latte wedding website up and running.

I naturally thought that Mr. Latte would jump all over the idea of becoming the “webmaster” for our site. He was an IT Consultant in his past life, and could probably survive for weeks just off of water and the internet. So I asked him to create the website… without a plan. What kind of a plan, you ask?

See, I’ve had to devise numerous plans in the past to “gently guide” him into agreeing to help out with some wedding related tasks. Remember that lame excuse I used to get him to research and book our hotel blocks? That was all part of the plan. And that time I used the free food and gift trick to get him to come with me to the Crate & Barrel event? Yup, all planned out ahead of time. But I thought I had this one in the bag.

He said that he wasn’t interested in making our website and I was caught off guard.
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Welcome to our wedding website! Having a Computer Science degree, I’ve always looked forward to this aspect of the wedding planning process. Once we decided that we would have a destination wedding in Hawaii, we wanted everyone to know as soon as possible. A lot of our friends were likely to use their airline miles and hotel points, and since airlines limit the number of seats available for point usage, we wanted to give them the heads up on the date, location, etc. My girlfriend highly recommended Wedding Window. There were so many goodies included in the $80/year price, that we didn’t mind paying. There were a ton of templates to choose from, and they were all customizable.

The Pigsters love snowboarding. Mr. Pig often claims he’s X Games material.

Some of my favorite features were:
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Ahhhh… MOO mini-cards. They are so darn… cute. And printed on the silkiest, most delectable cardstock. (I am typing this with a straight face because it’s true.)

After months of pining over them, I finally figured out a way to use them!
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