Our Wedding Website

Thanks to the wonderful advice and example set by our own Mrs. Wallaby, I decided to create our wedding website through Wix. It was actually quite simple and I had a lot of fun creating a unique look that reflects the theme of our wedding. I upgraded to a premium account and bought a domain name through 1&1. You can actually buy a domain name directly through Wix or through a variety of other providers. It was important to us to have a web address that is simple and easy for our guests to remember, plus it's incredibly inexpensive! I would highly suggest purchasing your own domain name.

I have a widescreen monitor so I was struggling with cropping these images and keeping the look of the website. Sorry they are a little wonky!

The main page really sets the stage with our wedding colors and one of our engagement photos. The flower graphics were actually from a Wix template but they worked perfectly for our purposes! And yes, because I apparently live on the internet of the 1990s, we have a song that plays when you visit our site. You can turn it off with the pause button, but I just had to do it, as stupid as I know it sounds. It plays a song from the soundtrack of Sophia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette.

I wanted to have a little fun with the website, so I added some 18th century fashion plate illustrations to tie it into our wedding theme. These illustrations won't have a place on our big day, but I thought the website was the perfect place to add them and incorporate some of that whimsical flair. You will see them on subsequent pages of our website.

If you can't tell from the screenshot above, I broke our website down into several pages: Our Story, Gallery, People (an introduction to parents of the bride and groom and the bridal party), Events (address and maps for the ceremony/reception and rehearsal dinner), Accommodations, RSVP, and Registry. 

The "Our Story" page has a brief description of myself and Mr. C, how we met, and an abridged version of our engagement story. There are plenty of my distant family members or family friends who have never Mr. C (and vice versa) so this allows them to get to know a little about us before the wedding. 

Since we are also having a lot of out of town guests, I decided to include sections that recommend local restaurants and bars as well as tasty local beers. I hope our guests check out some of our town's amazing local eateries!

And because our we have some family drama, we blocked out three different hotels and designated family/friends for each hotel. I know that sounds crazy, and I would prefer that everyone just happily get along, but it was necessary to keep the peace.

The "People" tab for the website introduces our guests to the bridal party and our parents. This means that these amazing people are recognized and appreciated at the wedding. Again, sorry for the weird cropping, but on the main site the rococo ladies are not cut off.

Wix is great because if you are ever unsure or confused about adding a feature, they usually have a step-by-step video in their help section to walk you through adding specific features to your site. I am definitely a hands-on learner who sometimes has difficulty translating written instructions into actions. That's why video tutorials have been my absolute savior lately, especially when it has come to creating our save-the-dates and invitation suite in Adobe Illustrator.

After setting up our website, I created an account with Google Analytics (it's free!) and linked it to our wedding site. This allows me to track the number of visitors and the location of visitors (even down to city) who have visited the site. So far, it's been quite a hit!

In the end, I hope our guests find our webpage easy to navigate and informative. Most importantly, however, I hope it gets them really excited about our wedding!

Do you have a wedding website?