Wedding Website!

Image via CrunchBase

Welp, I've officially made a wedding website for info on our upcoming wedding!

At first I wasn't going to do one at all, cause I wasn't sure that anyone would use it. I'm still not sure anyone will actually use it, but Patrick said he wanted one, so I put one together for him. Ok, to be honest, I like blogs and stuff, so I enjoyed it, but I really wasn't going to make one at first.

Originally I was using one of those wedding sites to make a web page, but honestly, I thought it was a crappy layout, didn't allow you to edit or customize much, and (the deal breaker) uploaded pics at a crappy resolution for some reason. FYI, I was just trying out Wedding Wire since that's the one I'm using for budget planning and all of that, so I'm sure there are other good ones out there, I just didn't want to put in the effort to find it.

Instead, I came back to trusty old Blogger, which we know and love. At first I was a tad stumped on how to make it look more like a website and less like a blog, but after a morning's worth of fiddling, I think I came up with something that works, which is now OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Emma and Patrick's Wedding Website!

Just so I can show off, here are some of the tricks I maneuvered to make it feel more like a webpage rather than a blog:

First and foremost, I needed there to be a "home page" which Blogger doesn't really have. Instead, I made a post about "welcome to our website, blah blah blah," then dated the post for the future (I dated it August 16th, since that's our wedding date). That way, no matter what I post from here on out, as long as it's before the wedding, that post will always be first.

The other critical change I made was to actually use the "labels" option, which I never do for this blog. Then I moved the info box on the side bar for "labels" to the top of the page and renamed it "Navigate" so that it would be the primary way to navigate around the site. Now it's just a matter of labelling posts the title of what I want the page to be called. This one I was extra proud of, because I was trying for the longest time to alter the Archive features to JUST use the post title, and NOT sort by date, which was totally not happening. This served the same purpose, just maneuvered around the archive feature. Works for me!

Other things I did included:

Made it so only one post is shown per page (rather than scrolling down to see previous posts).

Removed all of the standard info boxes on the side bar like "about me" and "followers" and such.

Move the Archive box to the bottom of the sidebar (I still wanted people to be able to have multiple ways to navigate, but the dates they were posted mattered less than the label feature, which is up top.)

Added a slideshow (I put select pictures on an album on Picasa, then just used the standard slideshow feature, which automatically goes through whichever Picasa album you set up.)

Yes yes, I know, I am so smart and awesome and technologically savvy... and modest! hHAhahhahahahHAahahaaha. ok enough tooting my own horn.

If you have suggestions for me to change the wedding "website" at all, lemme know!