Creating Personal Wedding Website

Creating personal wedding websites are becoming more and more popular these days. Should you follow the trend and create one? You decide.

A personal wedding website is not just for posting your pictures and wedding date, it can be used to enable your guests instant access, 24/7, to your gift registry information, maps and directions, video clips and a message board for live interactive discussions and planning, to name a few. Your wedding website can also become a centralized source of information for your checklists, guest database, address book, budget manager and payment tracking.

The easiest way to create a personal wedding website is through companies that offer all-inclusive packages, which includes the hosting, website templates and planning tools.   These sites usually charge an annual or semi-annual fee to get your site on the web and often provide easy to use tools that you can use even without any web development experience.  These services make wedding websites popular.  The website gives you the convenience to manage your wedding plan details from anywhere you have internet access through your laptop, BlackBerry or Smartphone.  No more bulky three-ring wedding planning binders to carry around. 

Wedding Website Services are not Created Equal
This is no surprise to you, I am sure. Some provide fewer features than others. No matter which wedding website provider you choose, below are the features that should be included in their service offerings:

• Password protection to protect the contents  such as names, addresses, discussions including pictures that you uploaded in your wedding website.  If you do not want to password protect your website, the service provider should at least have security measures to enable you to collect valid email addresses of visitors to your site.
• No risk free trial period, usually one to two weeks in duration. They should not require you to give up any credit card information to get your free trial, either.
• Offers a variety of wedding website templates that you can choose from, not just the same or very similar designs in different colors.
• Website is easy to customize. Changes and additions to your website should be easy to do. You should be able to switch from a “what you see is what you get” to an HTML editor, if you so choose.
• Price for an annual subscription should be around $100 per year or less. Do not assume that the higher the price, the better the service; the most expensive ones are not necessarily the best.
• Must have the features you like and need. We mentioned the uses of a wedding website above. These are the basic features. In our next post, we will look into the features detail and compare some wedding services for you decide which ones are for you.

In the meantime, do your Internet search for wedding websites.  Sign up for more than one service and compare them using your free trial period. 

(Screen shot of wedding template is from www.WeddingOcean.com. Completely Weddings did not receive any renumeration for featuring this template)