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Monday, February 08, 2010

Wedding Website Woes

Mr. Cathedral Heights works as a computer programmer, so naturally I’d envisioned him being incredibly excited about putting together an amazing wedding Website for us. Right? Wrong.

No matter. Plan B: Make the Website myself. I figured it couldn’t be that hard—just choose a service, fill in the information, and you’re set. However, as I spent more time researching each site than I thought I’d spend actually building one, I began to realize that it isn’t so easy. As with every piece of the wedding planning puzzle, complicated details emerge that you would never have imagined, details that constitute entire college majors. I scoured the net for affordable or free packages and finally decided on one that coincided with a very well known wedding site. This particular one appealed to me because, for a small fee, I could have the domain name I wanted, which meant the url would fit on the Save the Date postcards we were soon sending. I entered my credit card information and reserved our domain name. Or so I thought.

The morning after purchasing our domain, which the site assured me was available, I prepared to get to work and instead found that suddenly the domain name we bought was unavailable. Unfortunately, my aunt, an artist, had already put the url we created on the handmade original Save the Date that she’d planned on bringing to the printers that day. (Please note: If you are getting married, this type of incident will most likely happen more than once in the planning process). I asked her to hold off while I sent a barrage of messages to customer service. Days passed and I didn't hear back. I finally called my credit card company and asked them to dismiss the charge, as I couldn’t get in touch with the service provider.

Fortunately, a friend mentioned iWeb, a Mac application that helps the average user make a Website. I’ve always been a PC girl; however, I recently started a new job and have been using a Mac for the first time in years. Along with a tiny bit of help from my brother/Man of Honor and Mr. Cathedral Heights (it’s amazing how little advice they had to share with me, both being in technology fields…men…), I figured out how to build us a site using iWeb, and my brother generously offered to host the site with his mobile me account. I don’t have a full understanding of how it all works, but I’m almost finished adding photos and text and I was able to snag a short yet personalized domain name.

And, of course, the original wedding Website got back to me as soon as I finished building the site on my own. One piece of advice for the brides out there: read the reviews that you can find on website hosts, as some are much more reliable than others. Oh, and don't be too disappointed when plans go awry--you'll find a way to fix it.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Miss JeffMemorial said...

I hear you about wedding website woes. I was so cranky with so many of those wedding website services out there that I ended up just creating a Wordpress.com blog and customizing it with pages and other things.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010 5:20:00 PM  

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