Our website 'look' for the October California Wedding (website still under construction!)
With so much of our wedding planning happening from a distance and both our wedding locations–Cornwall, England, and Siskiyou County, California–being rather remote (accidental destination weddings really!), Alex and I have relied on our wedding website to rely much of the information for our guests (as well as keep it altogether for ourselves!). Using a wedding website also cut down on postage & paper-usage with the invites, an economical & green alternative.
Our website 'look' for the April English wedding (screen capture taken after the wedding)
With the different themed ‘looks,’ we incorporated the major colors for the weddings (green & purple for the UK wedding, red & brown for the CA wedding) as well as personalizing each section of the Transportation/Accomodation/Attractions sections of the website to the local areas. There were also slight shifts in the contents after the home page and ‘Our Story:’
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CA Ceremony/California
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UK Ceremony/England
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Our Honeymoon/Honeymoon
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Best Men/Wedding Party
Each Ceremony page had a iternary, or ‘Order of the Day,’ for each wedding, breaking down the different meals, events and timings so that guests would know what to expect when (and when they could sneak off for a wander or a nap!). We also had a ‘UK Wedding Plus’ section in April to include the rehearsel dinner and Sunday brunch/day trip plans and will probably have a similar page for the California wedding as well including the Bridal Shower and possibly the Bachellorette Party too!
On the website, we also included a Music page, Photo Galleries (engagment photos included), a link to our blogs (shout out to SYE!), Contact Us, Guestbook, and Gift Registries. Along the lines of our Gift Registries, our Honeymoon page was actually our Honeymoon Registry page. In other words, we outlined what we wanted to do on our honeymoon, where and why, and how much it would cost with a pretty picture beside it. It was a good idea initially (a tip from a friend of a friend who got married on the same day) but in hind sight, I wish we had originally gone (and may still, for the California wedding) with SYE approved vendor, Buy Our Honeymoon. The feedback we got from guests was that with the static list, they didn’t know who had already bought what and they felt less comfortable going for something. Also, we had a few problems with checks being in one or both our names so that the money couldn’t easily be in one place. Lesson learned!
Mostly, I have actually a lot of fun designing both versions of the site. There are so many possibilities with a website to get across not only what’s going to happen where, but who you are as a couple. If you’re at all in doubt of whether or not to have a ‘wedsite,’ I say go for it! It just one more opportunity to communicate with those you love and articulate who you are as a loving, excited engayged couple.
Love your wedsites! They look really great. I like that you put stuff about both yor weddings on both of the sites! It looks like you put a lot time time&energy&thought into putting it together – I’m sure your guests will really appreciate them! We did the website thing too, and found it was a great way to get all the info in one place and keep people feeling “involved” and informed all the way along.
I wanted to let people who are planning know about this: After poking around at a bunch of the different wedding website options, I ended up creating our own site with http://www.webs.com They aren’t a wedding webstie company, they just provide free websites with customizable templates. For it to be 100% free there will be an ad on your site (which sucks), but you can pay a measly little $15 to have no ad! WAY cheaper than any of the wedding websites that you pay for, and guaranteed to be the way you want it – no issues about navigating around the crap that doesn’t apply to same-sex weddings. You can use your own photos and designs, and create as many types of pages within the site as you want. Other people can upload photo albums to share, and you can even create a section where people can sign up and have profile pages if you want there to ba an element of “get to know the other guests/family/weding parties, etc”. And you can have forums, blogs, calendars, events, and tons of other stuff I couldn’t even handle! For those of you more industrious than I, there is even the option of creating an online secure payment system/store where you could actually CREATE your own honeymoon or cash-gift registry as part of your site.
Sorry, I swear I don’t work for webs.com or anything! I just had such a great experience using them for our wedding because it was so customizable and I think is a great option especially for those in the queer wedding world who are doing something that they feel doesn’t fit the typical weding format. It took more time to put together than the usual wedding websites that are available, but it’s worth checking out!
Love this thread! And, the screen shots of your site are fabulous! I’m happy to say that I had spoken with the mywedding.com team about their hetero-biased terms earlier this spring. I find them to be a very open, gay-friendly company, but, yes, there’s room for improvement!
I, too, recommend that the more adventurous set strike out (as Mandy suggests) to find basic web site builders for the wedding web sites. There are many great options out there (especially for those who are more about presenting information in a secure environment in favor of organizing RSVPs).
I would also be remiss not to mention (provided the fabulous SYE gals will indulge me!) our simple Wed Pages at GayWeddings.com. They offer couples a simple chance to share a few facts about their wedding celebrations (we keep personal info shared to a minimum to protect the privacy of our users).
Cheers!
I really love the care and detail that you have put into your wedding websites. If you decide that you would like to use a honeymoon registry, we are also a SYE approved vendor and care very deeply about our gender-neutral approach to life’s most important celebrations. It would be my pleasure to help you personally if you’re up for it. Congrats on your wedding!
Cheers,
Dana
Founder: Deposit a Gift
*feel free to contact me directly: dana [at] depositagift [dot] com
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