Our wedding website

When we first decided to DIY our invitations, the thought of having to make a load of reply cards as well just made me feel sad.

"wouldn't it be great" I said "if everyone could RSVP online, like on our personal website or something?"

And so I googled (because my first response to any problem is to go to google) and found that actually, it was really easy to get your own wedding website. There are literally hundreds of different sites that allow you to build your own pages - ranging from the very simple, just some info about the wedding type sites, to the full blown everything you will ever need in order to attend the wedding types.

I had a look around and in the end I decided to go with Getting Married.co.uk because they are completely free, really user friendly, and I liked the website address you got: www.yournames.gettingmarried.co.uk

When you start making a Getting Married website, there are lots of page templates already there, you just need to fill in the details. For example, without changing anything on the site you already have pages called:

• About us
• Wedding Party Profiles
• Ceremony Info
• Reception Info
• Table Plan
• Timetable
• RSVP
• Have Your say
• Gift Registry
• Where to Stay
• Transport and Travel
• Lift Sharing
• Wedding Blog
• Guestbook
• Photo Gallery

and you can add as many custom pages as you like. 

When I started making the website, I wasn't in work, so I had hours to spend fiddling about with it and changing it around over and over again. I also discovered widgets and how to put them on the site! Very exciting for me, that was. And after about amonth of trying to figure out how to do it, I finally found a way to get music on the website! (This is the only feature I really wanted that Getting Married can't provide on a free site).

Here are a few screen shots of our website:

Password enter page

You can choose whether or not to password protect your whole website, or specific pages. Ours has a password at the moment, but when the invitations go out we will remove the password.

Home Page top half

The style we chose for the wesbite is supposed to use a panoramic picture at the top, but since I didn't have one, I just did a quick banner instead. I also put a countdown timer widget on the home page.

Home page bottom half

You can see the rest of the menu and also a Facebook "like" button that I added. Below that, which you can't see on this picture, is a weather forecast box and the music player.

Ceremony info

The ceremony and reception info pages have space for a picture and also list the address, phone number and website for the venues. There is also a google map showing the location of the venue.

RSVP page

We have 2 RSVP forms - one for day guests and one for evening guests. The only difference between then is that the day one asks for your menu choice and the evening one doesn't.

RSVP form

I'm really happy we went with the RSVP option as I think it's alot easier and will hopefully mean that everyone will remember to do it.

Wedfest poster

We are hoping to stay in a group of cottages for the weekend with the wedding party and some of our guests. We are calling these events "Wedfest" and I made a quick poster to jazz up the information page.

Directions

 The directions page allows guests to put their postcodes in and get driving directions to the venues and any of the hotels we have listed. You can also see the music player in this picture.

Accommodation page

 We have listed the nearest hotels to the venue, and the nice, convenient google map allows the guests to see where abouts they are. They can also add their name to the guestlist of a particular hotel so we can see who is staying where.

request a song page

We used the "Have your say" page - which allows you to put votes and polls onto the website, as a song request page. Hopefully all of the guests will request at least one song and we will pass the list on to the DJ

I will probably end up changing the websitre around about 10 more times before the invitations go out, but it probably wont change too much from what it is now.

If anyone is thinking about having a wedding wesbite, I would definitely reccommend www.gettingmarried.co.uk because of how simple it is to use, and the creators are coming up with new features to add daily.

I think we will save alot of time and money by having a website, because if we didn't we would have had pocketfold invitations to hold all the necessary information, plus reply cards, and then there's postage to think about too!

I find it alot easier to have everything on a website, but it's not the most traditional way to do it. I suppose if you had alot of of older guests who were not particular computer savvy, then a RSVP online system might not be the best idea. But for us, I think it will work really well. I hope so anyway!