Wedding Websites and a Sneak Peak at mine!

I never realised how much invitations cost to post until I had my 30th a (cough) couple of years ago. The major issue was that I picked a weird card size. Anyhoo, when it came to our wedding invitations it became quite important not to use too much of our budget on stamps. So we cut the pages and pages of information that standard invites contain and decided to make a website. It was great doing some blog design again and work out the 'look' of our day with A. We spent a LOT of time collating the information to help all of our English guests find their way across the pond to Germany. Here's a sneak peak.

This is our homepage. Can you guess our colour scheme? We wrote a welcome message on the front and the picture is from our trip to Budapest - the day before the BIG proposal.

I used Google documents to make a RSVP form. Most of our guests will be tech-savvy enough to do this, but we have also put other ways of responding on the back of the invitation.

The location page is really important. As many people will be travelling to the area for more than the wedding day, I put together information about the area as well as links to all of the major travel providers. A also wrote out all of the directions people will need to drive to and from every aspect of the wedding. These are available as downloadable Word documents.

The hotel section was a combined effort. The countryside where the wedding is set is very beautiful, but the wonderful people speak very little English. My lovely man had a lot of phoning, negotiating and information to gather so that I could write down the best options for the guests. We will also be adding in German documents too which we scanned in from the Tourist Board (I haven't quite got there yet though!)
Lastly we had two pages called 'Gifts' and 'The Big Day'. We chose a gift poem to place on this page, but the most fun I had was making this graphic to give an overview of our celebration:

I have great hopes that this will iron out some of the questions about what to expect from our very Gerglish wedding.

By having this website we are able to keep our invitations nice and simple (like us....). From the feedback I have had from the very few important people who have looked over it for me, I think it will provide useful support to help people to be able to come along.

So my top tips for building a wedding site would be:
1. Use a free blogging platform (I used blogger - because that's where my design skills are at.)
2. Back up your design so that if it collapses you can reinstate it. If you aren't great at web-design then perhaps choose word-press and an existing theme which best suits the tone of your wedding.
3. Ensure your website reflects the design and feel of your wedding. We're going for something contemporary, hand-made and multi-cultural.
4. Think about what your guests would want to know. The more information you can provide for them the easier it will be to sign-up to be part of it. How can they get there? Where is it? What will happen on the day? Is there a dress code? When do I need to RSVP by? What should I bring with me? etc.
5. Make sure your partner is part of the process. This was a combined effort. I might have the web skills, but could not have found all of the information by myself. That's for sure. If he didn't like my design ideas I would have changed them.

So there we have it - this took up a good two or three weeks of my time. But it was well worth it and not just for the cost of some stamps. It also centered our thinking on what we both wanted the 'style' and 'voice' of our wedding to be. It enabled us to communicate better with the great designer friend who is designing our invitations as I type and it is a BIG job off of the massive 'To-Do' list.

For anyone who has ever organised a major event, we all know how good that feels. How did you organise your wedding invites? Would you ever go completely digital? I would love to hear from you.