Our Wicked Wedding Website

One of my favorite things about our wedding was the web site I created the month after we got engaged.  Back in January of 2009 I set up a site through http://www.weddingwindow.com/.  It's not free like many other sites, but I believe it offers way more than most of those free sites do. And at only $89 for 18 months worth of hosting, it was well worth the cost!

I have used it to communicate everything to our guests (family and friends): 

*  Stories about our relationship, proposal and backgrounds
*  Pictures and info about our ceremony and reception and venue
*  Collecting address information from guests
*  Receiving messages and congrats from guests via the Guestbook
*  Listing info and pics about our wedding party members
*  Collecting online RSVP's for not only the wedding but other events like showers, rehearsal, etc.
*  Sharing a calendar of events with guests about all wedding related activities
*  Listing gift registry info as well as links directly to our registries with store sites
*  Sharing a special blog, updates and news info with our guests
*  Providing contact information as well as directions to all wedding related events with maplinks directly to sites for guests to get directions
*  Providing travel and hotel information
*  Sharing fun things like Then and Now photos of the wedding party, a quiz all about me and Mr Fix It, games and puzzles using pictures of us, and other photos and video
*  Sharing information about our honeymoon details
*  Having a special page dedicated to the memory of those who have passed that are special to us
*  Providing info and references regarding all of our vendors
*  Sharing information about our house and new address

The cool thing about this site is that you can password protect the entire site or specific pages if you'd like.  You can also customize so many of the templates and add photos and video throughout the site. 

I absolutely love it and we have gotten great feedback from our guests about it as well.  One of my favorite things is they let you put the entire site on a CD when you are finished with it so you can keep it as a keepsake forever.

You can check out our site here:  http://www.staceyandjohn.weddingwindow.com/. 

Do you have a wedding web site?  What do you love about it?

How to announce you're engaged!

So a fellow blogger friend asked me if I had any ideas on how to announce via today's technology that you're engaged.  I was flattered she wanted my opinion and thought I'd share a few quick thoughts I came up with off the top of my head.  And plus, by putting it out here to you lovely ladies maybe you'll have some ideas of your own!

1)  I am a big fan of videos.  With today's technology it's easy to quickly edit together a movie trailer, slide show, or little skit about the story of your relationship or announcing your engagment or wedding.  Many people are using sites like their blogs and YouTube to send out Save the Dates.  I'm sure you've seen a few of these throughout the blogosphere:

2)  If you don't have the time, software or knowledge to do something like that though you can always use free sites like photobucket.com or slide.com to create a simple slideshow of photos with captions.  Or get even more creative and actually make signs to hold up in your photos.  I quickly threw together this mini slideshow in Photobucket for an example.  You could post this on your blog or e-mail the link to friends and family. You could take it a step further by typing something like this in the e-mail:

You can't run!

You can't hide!

From the relationship that just.......won't......DIE!!!!

The Story of Us

Stacey & John are ENGAGED!

Coming soon to a church near you...

Stay tuned....

3)  Another idea is if you have a niece or a friend's daughter you know you will want to ask to be your flowergirl.  You could take a photo of her throwing flower petals in the air and write a caption over the photo (or put a sign in the photo with her) that says "I'm going to be a flowergirl in Aunt Jenn's wedding!"    E-mail (or mail) the photo out to friends and family and maybe even write the story of the proposal in the e-mail.  You can do something like this with just about anything:  Pets, children, friends or even the happy couple.  Just have them hold up photos and create a photo strip or 'card' spelling out the exciting news.

4)  Along the lines of the slideshow above, you can use a site like http://www.shutterfly.com/ to create an online photo album where you can write out your love story next to the photos.  Send the link to family and friends with a note that says "We created a fun online photo album that we wanted to share with you."  Then next to the pics put things like "Here's us on our cruise to Mexico."  "Here's the first time John ever told me he loved me."  The very last one will be a pic of you two with your engagement ring or with him on one knee proposing and you write out "And here's John proposing to me!  And now we're engaged!"

5)  Sites like theknot.com and jibjab.com also have these silly e-videos you can create by uploading a photo of yourself and framing your face in it.  They then put your faces on someone else's body and have you doing a silly dance or something like that.  You can e-mail the link to the e-video to friends and family or embed it on your blog as a silly way to announce your engagement!  Here's some silly examples I quickly created:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

6)    Sites like http://www.motionbox.com/ allow you to upload videos and send them as e-cards to people.  Using a web cam, video cam on your photo camera or cell phone or an actual video camera, you can create a simple video message, skit or whatever and then upload it to these sites and add messages to e-mail to friends and family.

Using a site like onfuego.com (a little more risque but totally usable), you can do something like this where those who view your card can even leave comments about it:

http://www.onfuego.com/sample-video-ecard

7)  One of my FAVORITE simple e-card announcements is this one from bluemountain.com:  http://www.bluemountain.com/display.pd?prodnum=3103161&path=83058

So, what do you think?  I just quickly tried to throw these ideas together...what are some ways you announced your engagement or suggestions for Jenn on how to use technology to do so?  We actually told most of our family and friends over the phone or in person.  But for those we don't see as often, we created a wedding website and then sent an e-mail out to all our friends and family telling them to check out our new site.  It had all the info and stories about our relationship, proposal, etc.  Check it out here:  http://www.staceyandjohn.weddingwindow.com/.  The plus to this feature is that I can use it to collect RSVP's for all kinds of wedding related events and on the back administrative end of it, I am able to keep track of things like addresses for guest lists, budgets, to-do lists, vendor contact info, etc.