I'm not much into DIY stuff... at least not super crafty things like my invites, or making paper balls or sewing a dress. (I did have a plan to DIY the flowers... FH talked me out of that!) I was, however, dead-set on building my own wedding webpage.I already have a low-maintenance website for my photography, and I just couldn't justify paying for a website when I already pay $100+ every year to a hosting company, which allows me to host an unlimited number of URLs. So, I paid $10 for our domain name, and got to work.
Halfway through our engagement, I finally have a wedding page I almost like. But it's taken me 6 months to do what someone else could have done in a few hours! The problem is that my coding skills, where 1 is inserting hyperlinks and 10 is coding a webpage from scratch, are about at level 5. So that's an issue. The other is that I don't have any major web-building software (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.), so I'm limited to something I can install for free through my webhost.
I started out with a wordpress page, and I hated it right from the start. A wedding webpage should store lots of information, be simple to navigate, and relatively static (I don't think the front page should be changing all the time, for instance). I didn't like the blog-looking format. Also, I couldn't find any templates that were "wedding-y" enough. I worked on the page for a while and left it alone.
About a week ago, I decided that it wasn't enough and threw the whole thing out. In addition to wordpress, my hosting company has an easy 1-click install of Joomla, so I used that and, after a bunch of tutorials & Google searches, I've learned it. I've got the hang of it now, and I like the page. Click here to see the template I used.
It's a work in progress. I'm very proud of myself for adding a favicon. (!) Also, I'm going to create a registration-only portion of the site for the immediate family & bridal party, so they can have access to some extra information that I'd rather keep a surprise for the rest of our guests. I know Joomla has a bunch of form plug-ins, but we're just using a Google spreadsheet for our online-only RSVP.
I know the blogging bridal community has developers & coders far more talented than I. Anyone out there build your own page? How did you do it?
Photo from flickr user RosePhotosEtc.
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