The website is done!

Calvin and I have been working on our wedding website off and on since, well, June. Last night Calvin put on the finishing touches, and now we are up and running! We sent the link to our families late last night, and barring any unforeseen problems, should be sending out our virtual save-the-dates to friends and family either this weekend or next.

I now present to you our website:

The intro page. For some reason, the screencap didn't come out as clearly as it actually is.

The homepage.

The "Welcome to Cleveland" page

"Welcome to Cleveland" continued.

And the photo gallery.

Now, both of us admit that our site is pretty simple. Originally we had designed it using iWeb '06. Now, there were a couple of things about iWeb '06 that I didn't especially like- mostly that it is almost impossible to change the font of the links at the top of the page without putting them in manually. So we upgraded to iWeb '08 the week it came out, since it had that and some other nifty features, and updated our site, not backing up the original files since Apple software products are normally a lot more stable than most others. Unfortunately, the updating changed around all of the formatting of the site, since we changed our version of iWeb before the patch to fix that problem came out.

I searched around for an open source solution, and finding none that were especially palatable, downloaded the trial of Dreamweaver, and assembled the basics of the site. When it was "all done", we realized that one of the fonts we were using is non-standard, and therefore wouldn't render properly on most computers. We played around with embedding fonts, but ultimately decided to just make all of the headers images. Playing around with the images took awhile- there was a bit of MS Paint vs. Gimp vs. OpenOffice Draw debate, but Calvin took care of making the images. (Figuring out the images also forced us to try and figure out how to overcome the differences between how browsers render images.) To jazz up our site, I made a custom google map and Calvin added a simpleviewer gallery. We probably made it a whole lot more complicated than it needed to be- I think a total of 6 different programs were used, since after the license for Dreamweaver expired, I did the last bit of content tweaking in Notepad.

We purchased our domain through Go Daddy, and are hosting it on a friend's server. Total cost altogether for the website was in the neighborhood of $7.

So, I have some tips for those of you (like us) who have only basic html skills:
1. Images, especially images that only have a handful of colors (like the damask-style image on our website) are best made into .gif files. It leads to the most consistent rendering across images.
2. MS Paint does not do a good job with .gif files.
3. If you want to use non-standard fonts (and I would encourage you to do so), make them as images.
4. If you are upgrading your html editing software (or any software, really), make a back-up before you totally update. Even if the software is coming from a really reliable company.
5. Simpleviewer is really awesome for displaying pictures.
6. OpenOffice Draw continues to rock my world, and it is rocking Calvin's now, too. Both of us find it quite a bit more intuitive than Gimp.
7. We ended up not using standard websafe colors for our site, mostly because the websafe reds were too bright. There are pros and cons to not using those colors, but we determined that most, if not all, of the people who would visit our site would have updated computers and graphics capabilities, and that it wouldn't pose too much of a problem. This site provides both the hex (for html programming) and rgb (for images) code for all sorts of colors.
8. It is really easy to make custom maps with Google maps, and is a great way to provide a lot of information (about restaurants, museums, etc.) in a very efficient and useful manner.

Anyone else have any tips for those that are building their own website?

reception surprise

There are a whole lot of things that you can do at a reception to surprise guests- unusual desserts, an unexpected tribute to a family member, or fun activities (like a photobooth!). Or you can do what a fellow blogger did:



How awesome is it to pull off a "spontaneously" choreographed dance? Basically, the bride and groom choreographed the dance with the members of the bridal party that lived in town, sent out instructional DVDs to everyone else, and rehearsed it the night before the wedding. More detailed directions are given here.

Calvin and I had originally said no cheesy group dancing (seriously, this was on our list of "have nots" that we made before we even told our parents that we were engaged), but seeing this dance has made us (at least temporarily) reconsider.

What are your thoughts about group dancing at weddings? And do you have any fun surprises planned that you don't mind sharing?

Wedding websites

Being fairly technologically savvy- (Well, Calvin is, seeing as he works in IT; me, well, I've taken Introduction to Java, and have taught myself basic html using this excellent tutorial- really, it is, if you ignore the blinking things and really bright colors)- one of the first things that we talked about was a wedding website. We knew that we wanted one, and absolutely didn't want to use a premade template.

Now, if you are looking to take the path of least resistance, MyWedding.com and WeddingAnnouncer.com both offer free wedding websites. If you register with Bed Bath & Beyond, you can get a free website from them as well.

But like I said, the easy way is not the way for us.

To gather ideas, I dug around in places like google and indiebride for websites that I liked. And I did find some that really stood out to us:

Thryn and Gabe

Nice, simple homepage, although there is no link to it at the top.

The flower motif carries throughout the site.

Kelly and Aaron have a nice, simple site.

Again, the clean, simple homepage

Pictures!

And Alec and Katie have a very awesome, design oriented site.

I love the way the motif is used

Again, continuity with the flourish.

So, using these favorite websites, we considered their common elements:
-consistent use of color
-horizontal navigation bar
-use of one motif throughout

We also noted that the style really does seem to reflect the atmosphere of the wedding. So we have a start for the design of our site. What about the content?

All of the sites shown above have brief biographies of the bride and groom, information about the wedding and reception, information for the out of town guests and registry information. Two (Thryn and Gabe and Alec and Katie) also have guestbooks. All of them have photographs. Two (Alec and Katie and Kelly and Aaron) have information about the bridal party.

Calvin and I are planning on having information about the wedding and reception, info for the out of town guests, and the registry information. How much biographical information is good? Will guests want to sign a guestbook? Or know more about the bridal party? Is there anything else that is useful to include?

What suggestions do you have for our wedding website?