When I first started planning my wedding (and yes, I WAS one of those girls who was planning many, many years before being engaged) I always thought that a wedding website sounded so tacky and provincial. However, with my wedding in 2012 I had to face the facts that the internet was one of the best ways to get in touch with people. So I bit the bullet, and began researching wedding websites.
I was actually quiet shocked at how beautiful, understated and also what a great tool they turned out to be! Wedding websites are not only used to communicate important details (that can’t fit on the invitations) with your guests, they are also a fantastic resource for planning all aspects of your wedding.
I used weddingwire.com for my engagement, save-the-date, and wedding websites. I found they had the most (and best) options for the website templates. There were many style and colour options to choose from and I easily found one that matched the theme of my wedding.
I ended up picking one style template for the engagement & the wedding that was inspired by Vera Wang invitations, but just changed the colour for the engagement party. This way the website created a clear tie between the engagement and the wedding. Because each event had a similar theme but were very different, the colour distinction gave them both a unique feel.
Customizing Your Website
There are so many ways you can do this but I’ll focus on what I did to give you a starting off point.
On the Home Page were our names, the date of the event, and the name of the event.
This page included one of our engagement photos (another great use for these!), a history of our engagement, brief summary of the event to come, and the typical salutations one would expect.
The tabs are where you can customize endlessly! We added tabs for hotel accommodation, visiting/tourism information, registry information, a list of our bridal party, Contact Us tab, and a tab for “Guest Book” where guests could leave short comments and best wishes.
You can even add music! We kept it simple and just had one song linked with the whole site, but if you want you can really get into it and have a different song for each page.
Finally, as I mentioned before using one of these sites is not only for putting up a wedding website. You can plan your whole wedding through the site. There are so many tools to put to good use including (but not limited to!) managing your registry, wedding checklist, vendor search (complete with customer feedback), budgeting tool and an RSVP management list.
In conclusion, as soon as you get engaged start researching which wedding website provider is best for you. It will be an invaluable tool and it takes no time to set up.
