{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 and, well, blah (no offense intended to anyone out there who went with these options!). 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: GoDaddy.com Yeah, dumb name, but for only $121.35 a year I got my own URL, 999 pages with SSL, e-mail, I can do polls, photo albums, any type of form I want, and best of all, tons of space for pictures. Plus it comes with some really easy to use software, Website Tonight, and allowed me to customize the look and feel of our site and not be tied to a template. So without further ado, here is a shot of our welcome page:
(I just love how the color scheme matches our wedding colors, and the custom header goes with our STD magnets!)The next order of business, once I walked through the easy steps to set up the site and made our custom template was to gather and put up info for our guests. Sure, I would include the standard wedding day details and hotel room block info, but I really wanted to do something special for our out of town guests. A lot of them may decide to spend more time in the Bay Area than just for our wedding, considering they're traveling all the way across the country. So I pulled together the following info pages.
A shot of our side navigation bar, with all the top level page links:
Flight Info (under the transportation link), click on the images for a bigger picture:
(I always love it when I'm told upfront how long the flight is and I also thought it would be useful to give tips on how to find the best deals on flights)Getting around the Bay Area:
Next up was info on area attractions, both in San Francisco and nearer the hotel:
(I put a link to the attraction's website and a Google Maps link under each attraction picture, making it super easy for guests to find more info and plan their trip)I even put together a sample driving tour of SF, all mapped out as well:
Now tell me, wouldn't you love to attend a wedding in a different state, with all this helpful info already provided for you? I definitely would! I'm not sure why more brides don't take the time to set up an informative, detailed site?
Will you be, or have you already, put a lot of time and effort into your wedding website?
(all screenshots in this post were taken by me)
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Morgan - you are just plain awesome. That's all I got to say. :) I used iWeb for our website for the wedding - it costs about the same I think though. Now it's the baby website that you check (love it!!)
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