Wedding detail: our wedding website
It might seem like a silly little detail, but for me, one of the things I put a lot of thought into during our engagement was our wedding website!
Other than the save-the-date, the wedding website is the first point of contact that many of your guests will have with your wedding! It is a great opportunity for you to set the look and feel of your wedding, the thread that you want to carry through all the way to The Day itself. I often see couples using one of the free, templatized sites available for use, and while they get the job done, the bit of extra time and expense to develop a custom design makes a big impact AND is easier and more achievable than most probably realize!
If you graduated high school somewhere in the range of 2004 - 2007 like I did, you probably have a least SOME experience working with basic HTML and Hex color numbers from the endless (and ultimately pointless) hours you spent trying to make your Myspace page look cool (you know you did). And even if you didn't, many interfaces make it so you can get by just fine in website design even without any entry-level experience.
For our wedding website, after a lot of research, I decided to go with Squarespace as the host. As a non-wedding specific hosting platform, Squarespace doesn't build in the typical wedding-anything markup, and you can set up your site for about $100 for a year (plus 10% off with this coupon or 50% off if you're a student - amazing).
Squarespace offers stunning, totally customizable design templates and can also help you secure your own domain name. For our site, we kept the URL the same as our wedding hashtag to keep things consistent, and thus www.johnnylovesmari.com was born! We also used our site to showcase our engagement photos throughout, and to reinforce the logo that we would use on our paper goods and other wedding elements even down to the favors.
As a wedding to which many of our guests would be traveling, it was important for us to communicate information about what airport to fly into, where to stay, and what else they could do while in Orange County. It also gave us the chance to tell our love story, introduce our wedding party, and link to our Honeyfund registry.
For all the devotion couples pour into planning the details of their wedding, the website can sometimes become an afterthought. But it doesn't have to be! For Johnny and I, Squarespace made it possible to have a totally custom wedding website that provided a simple and beautiful way to communicate to our guests.