Wedding Website Essentials

Even though my wedding is small (it will probably end up being less than a hundred guests), I knew that Mr. Blue Moon and I would need to coordinate a wedding website because roughly half of our invited guests are from out-of-town. I have extended family in Georgia, and since Mr. Blue Moon and I both went out of state for school, we have college friends all over the country. Having been to dozens of weddings since the rise of the wedding website, I have seen a lot of sites, some good, and some bad. Thankfully, since our engagement will be 2+ years long before it's all said and done, I had a lot of time to draft and revise our website before it went live with the sending of our save the dates.

I think a wedding website needs to do three things to actually be functional instead of another useless thing on your to-do list.

1. Give guests a taste of how your wedding will look and feel overall.
2. Provide information for guests, particularly those that are coming from out of town.
3. Tell your story as a couple for anyone who cares.

The Nitty-Gritty
We went with Weddingwire.com to build our wedding website. It had the most options for what I needed, and I love that you can organize your site either as a scrolling list, or into subsections with a sidebar. At first, we had all of our pages as a scrolling list, but as we got deeper into planning and added more information to the website, we switched to the sidebar layout.

As you can see, our website is divided into ten pages. We may end up merging Song Requests and Registry with q&a, but we're still deciding. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Wedding Look
To coordinate our wedding website with our overall wedding theme, we chose a design that featured one of our wedding colors and vintage-esque accents to help our guests picture our wedding day. When guests first reach the website, they see our wedding date and city, and one of our favorite engagement pictures on a Welcome page. I also thought carefully about the tone of the writing on our website. For a very formal wedding, I think I would keep my tone formal as I write about my love story and wedding information. Since our wedding is not very formal, I kept my writing personable and warm throughout.
 

"Thank you so much for visiting our wedding website! This space will include information for our family and friends. We are in the early stages of planning, so please check back often for updates!

We're so excited to celebrate our special day with our nearest and dearest!"

Important Information
Of course, you will want to start by putting down addresses for your wedding and reception venues. Weddingwire also allowed us to include a handy map, which is nice since our reception venue doesn't actually have a physical address yet.

I think that even if your wedding guest list is small enough that you don't have to book a block of hotel rooms, it is still important to provide accommodation recommendations for your guests in a variety of price ranges. We suggested two hotels and one bed-and-breakfast to our guests that are all within about fifteen minutes of the ceremony location.

Another important touch is our list of local activities. Since we are getting married in our hometown, which is right outside of Nashville, we provided a ton of ideas for food and fun. We want all of our guests to have a blast in one of our favorite cities. We divided this page into "Eats," "Sweets," "Sightseeing," and "Music," but you could customize what you want to include based on your location. For example, not every city would need a whole section dedicated to music-related activities. We also found a picture to go with every subsection to give guests who have never traveled here an idea of what they can expect. Finally, if we had a personal story or anecdote about a particular place, we included that, too.

Finally, we dedicated a page to our wedding registry, and a FAQ page of questions and answers that we thought our guests might want to know about. On this page, we explain the wedding's dress code (dressy casual), special traditions we will incorporate into the ceremony, as well as the basics, like when we are going to send formal invitations and what to do if guests have a special dietary need.

Your Love Story
I am not sure how many of our guests want to read about the mushy stuff, but I included a page about our love story just in case. There are some people in Mr. Blue Moon's family who have never met me, and vice versa, so we wrote short biographies of each other, described how we met, and wrote about our engagement. 

Guestbook
Finally, I absolutely recommend including a guestbook. It seemed really cliche to me at first, but I have really enjoyed reading people's sweet messages, particularly from some of my students who happened across my page one day. Apparently stalking your teachers online is a real thing. But I am really happy to have these types of memories preserved.

Final Tips

• Get someone, or several someones, to proofread your website before it goes live. Even though I'm a reading teacher, I had several typos. 
• Include lots of pictures. Pictures add visual interest, and it's also a really nice way to feature your engagement photos, too. 
• As you think about information to include, consider what you would want to know before attending someone else's wedding, particularly if it was out-of-town. 

If anyone is interested in looking at what I came up with in more detail, I'm not super squeamish about sharing personal information, so you can check out our website here.

Are you going to make a wedding website for your special day? How did you go through the process of creating it?

*All photos are screenshots.