I knew that I wanted a wedding website. Not because it’s a necessary item, but just out of sheer principle. I live the majority of my life on the internet (I can’t believe I just said that). It’s true though. Every time I need something, the first place I check is the web. So, it just seemed natural that we would have a website for our wedding.The tougher part came when we actually sat down to design our site. Initially, I thought I would use Adobe Dreamweaver. It’s what I have used to create my Knot Bio, and it’s pretty user friendly. My life changed the day I read Miss Cupcake’s “Creating a Wedding Website with iWeb.” If you have an Apple and you think to yourself, “I can’t create a website by myself, what are these girls thinking?” Please, take a breath, read her article and then give it a go. I promise you will not be disappointed.
iWeb is one of the most user-friendly programs in the world. I’m totally serious. Don’t even think about how you want your website to look, just start playing around. I looked at a bunch of different websites before I made a decision about mine. I started out the same way Miss Cupcake described in the article. iWeb has predesigned templates that you can use to get you started. The first one is the “White” template. I picked that and just started playing around with the colors (through inspector).
Here is our “Welcome” screen. When you pick the template, it will say “Welcome” on the page, and you’ll need to make Inspector your best friend because everything can be changed through this menu. The “Welcome” text looks like it can’t be removed simply by selecting and deleting, but if you go through the Inspector, to the Page tab, you can uncheck display navigation menu to remove the text. From there, just customize to your heart’s desire!
When I first published the site, the font I used (located under Fun Fonts, called Typewriter) is a font specific to Apple, and thus it didn’t show up on a PC. [A side note, I used iWeb to make the site, but we didn't publish to a .Mac account, instead we bought a domain from 1&1 Internet. There are certain features you won't be able to use if you don't publish to a .Mac account, including password protection and the blog/guestbook feature, however Matthew is a computer programmer and was able to create a guest book in PHP.] To get around that, instead of using text boxes, insert a shape and then type inside the shape. When you publish the site, it will make the shape into a picture, thus keeping the font intact. An example of this is shown below:
Here is our “Directions” page. I decided to add a few more hours of work and created a map using Adobe Illustrator. It was quite easy, I just pasted a Google map and traced it accordingly. I also inserted a link to a Google map for good measure.
One of my favorites part of our site is the “Gallery.” iWeb makes this part super easy. You’ll need to add a page from the “White” template called My Albums. Make sure all your photos are in the iPhoto library and then it’s just drag and drop. We put our engagement pictures, pictures from the proposal and then pictures of our family and friends. 90% of our guests have been recognized in our gallery and we’re quite proud of that. For us, it was important to make our family and friends feel very much apart of our wedding.
Our Guestbook is Matthew’s pride and joy. I can only tell you that he wrote it in PHP, and if you’re really interested (and have a computer background), just post a comment and I’ll have Matthew contact you. Our guests have been really responsive to our Guestbook, so I’m really glad we took the extra time to create it.
Hope this helps. Happy website designing!!!
