The Ol' Dot Com

I wasn't originally going to have a wedding website. What did I need one for? Ohhhh, so people could find our registry? Did someone say...presents? In that case, I definitely needed a website. When we got closer to sending out our Save the Dates, I looked into free wedding website templates through The Knot and the like, assuming I'd just find a template that was plain yellow and call it a day. I didn't necessarily want or need something extraordinarily pretty or well designed. But I thought it would be nice to have the website match the wedding color scheme, at lease a tiny bit. After scrolling through template after template of swirly designs, beach backdrops, and flowery patterns, I stopped looking. What was the point of putting so much effort into making the save the dates match our color scheme if our website (our other first impression) was just going to have some random firefly motif on it? And that's when I discovered Google Sites (I swear I'm not being sponsored by Google. Why would they care about me anyway?).

 

Image via Google Sites blog

That being said, Google truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Google Sites is actually up on the Google menu along with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Reader, the other loves of my life. Go look, I swear it's there! It's basically a total n00b version of creating your own website from scratch. You don't have to know anything about HTML (though you can edit it if you're so inclined) and you can just use their page templates. The best part? I could customize the colors (yay, yellow!) and also upload photos to use as my background (yay, polka dots!). Wanna see the home page?

All screenshots by me

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I found a photo of gray and white polka dot cardstock on Google image search and tiled it for the background. How tackily resourceful. The edit screen was very simple and user friendly, especially if you're comfortable with web publishing to begin with. I admit that I used some tricks I learned on the job, but I've only been in web publishing for a little over a year, so I am by no means an expert.

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I added the navigation bar, which allowed me to add other pages like our music request page, bios of our wedding party, and of course, some info about our registries (which is actually empty right now because we, um, haven't registered yet). I also added a countdown widget that counts down the days until our wedding! I was pretty proud of myself for that one. I was even prouder of myself for adding the music request form widget:

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I just searched around to find a widget that would allow site visitors to leave a message that would be automatically sent to my email. Then I was able to personalize all of the fields to make them pertain to what we were using it for (song requests!). Here's what it looks like in the edit screen:

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See, it's not scary! It looks like MS Word, sort of!

Here's the wedding party page, where I wrote a little bio about each member and how Mr. Unicycle and I know each of them:

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I even figured out how to include a slide show of Unicycle pics, because as I said on the homepage, we are narcissistic:

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If you're curious what word I keep blurring at the top left of each screenshot, it's our super cool couple name. That's why the title is in 3rd person singular instead of plural. What, doesn't everyone have a couple name?  

The last thing I had to do for our wedding website was buy a domain name. If you're a complete cheapskate like me, you're probably thinking this is an unnecessary, frou frou expense. Trust me, I thought so too. But since the URL generated from Google Sites was so cumbersome--https://sites.google.com/site/[ournamehere]--I decided to look into the cost of buying a domain. We'd only need it for a year anyway. And it turns out anyone can afford one! We used Go Daddy and splurged on a dot com address. I believe it was about $2 for a dot info and $10 for a dot com, so we payed the extra $8 for a more recognizable domain extension. Plus, you wouldn't be interested in reading a blog post called "The Ol' Dot Info," right? 

 

Image via GoDaddy.com

Even I'm not immune to this marketing campaign.

Mapping the Google Site I created to our custom domain was a little tricky, and to be honest I can't even remember what I did. I found a tutorial on a geek forum somewhere and just did what it said, and after a few attempts, it worked. On caveat: you can't get to our site without typing in the "www." at the beginning. Apparently you have to purchase the domain with and without if you want it to redirect. And $20 was just too much money for these cheapskates.

Did you make a wedding website? Do you think I wasted my time and money just so I could make it match the wedding scheme?