A Wedding Destination

I take my job a bit too seriously. It's probably true in many senses, but the one I mean to use is that I let it flavor my thinking and strategy in many other areas of my life. So naturally, our wedding would need to have an online destination associated with it, full of useful content and social networking for our guests while giving them answers to wedding FAQs (how do we get there? where are you registered?) and helping them to make attending our wedding greener and more affordable.

A lot to ask of a wedding website? Perhaps.

And let's not forget that it also has to aesthetically match our invitations.

While there are some very serviceable wedding website services out there, some even for free, nothing offered the level of customization that I wanted. Well, let's be honest. Needed. So it was time for me to build website number 4.

It begins with the user experience and information architecture. What will guests want to know, what features will they want, and what supplemental information do we want to provide? My initial list included the backstory of Fiance and myself, who's who in the wedding party, directions, hotel info and nearby attractions for out of towners, gift registry info, details about the actual wedding and any additional brunches/dinners/whatever, and ways to reach out to other guests to share hotel rooms or rides to and from the wedding. There was more, but you get the gist. Then all those ideas were sorted into general categories, and everything was given a name. We're currently considering updating the site to include "Featured" participants of the wedding (readers, officiant, live musicians) and possibly a who's who of the bride & groom's families, since our family trees are somewhat convoluted.

Next, the design. I made a simple sketch of the general layout of a standard page, commonly known in the biz as a wireframe. Then I mocked up the homepage in photoshop, pulling in design elements from the invitation, specifically colors, fonts, the trapezoid shape, and the interlocking squares motif. Sorry folks, no sparkles.


Setting up the template took ages and didn't hold up to initial cross-browser testing, but eventually I got it hammered out and went on to develop the content and functional bits. For example, the screenshot (with blurred personal information to protect the not-so-innocent) on the left shows our wedding party. Each member is clickable which expands a layer showing their role in the party and a mini-bio. In this image you can also see the navigation on-state, which highlights the user's current location. That, by the way, is quite annoying to set up. That strange conglomeration of letters at the footer is the middle of a flash animation that has resolved in the first screenshot (thus the blurred out-ness).

Not to be forgotten are a couple of third-party applications that are connected to my home-grown site. (Part of good project management, and any good management really, is to know when to DIY and when to outsource.) An installation of phpbb3 powers a message board encouraging guests to connect with each other for fun, for the earth, and for their wallets, and a link to the previously mentioned buyourhoneymoon.com registry helps guests to gift us our Eurostar tickets or dinner in Montmartre. For some cosmically ironic reason, my future mother-in-law sent me an email to let me know how much she loves our website...especially the registry. Which I'm pretty sure means that she thinks I built it, not that she likes what's on it.

Now back to the part where I take my job too seriously. I knew when I designed the response cards that there was more information I wanted from our guests, but in the interest of giving the important stuff enough space and getting it back correctly filled in, I let it go. But it seems that now that we have affirmative responses, it might be a good time to find out where people will be lodging (our reserved hotel or elsewhere, if at all), when they will be arriving (important for delivering out-of-town info packets), and whether they will take advantage of our shuttle between the hotel and the wedding both before and after. Well what better way to collect this info than through an online form? And what better way to prompt them to let us know than with a highly stylized html email? And how great if we also took the opportunity to a) show off, and b) confirm receipt of their RSVP and give them a save-able reminder of their meal choices?

I can't imagine.

So, project-the-next: design and build an html email that is dynamically filled from the guest list database holding responses and meal choices and that offers a link (tagged with the respondent id #) to an online form that preloads their name and email and asks them for the additional info. Really, I might make it less complicated than that, since this plan is almost as difficult as building the online RSVP system that I wanted earlier but could not squeeze out of the fiance. But we'll see.

Have I totally lost my mind?