I have to say that I had a revelation when beginning our Wedding Website creation. It was the best way that I could finally explain to Mike - all the difficulty and reasoning behind what he thinks is my “Terra’s gone mad planning stage” when it comes to the wedding.

Creating a website is a lot like planning a wedding! No Joke.

All the thought of design and look (or wedding theme) takes place first… then you must create categories… such as About Us, Wedding, Reception, etc. (kind of like you do for a real wedding… ceremony/reception/cake/flowers/photos/etc. right?) THEN you have to think about what you want to do in each category… (what kind of cake, what color flowers) and THEN you have to research (this vendor or that vendor… this venue or that venue…etc.) and write and create the info that goes into each category. Is this starting to sound eerily similar?!!

So… once you have all the ideas in your head and know what you want and how you want it… then it’s time to put it into action. Thankfully - websites are much cheaper than weddings. :o) You can either input all the info you’d like into a free service such as theknot.com or you can have someone build you one for approx. €100-€200 and personalize it for you… OR… you can do it the way we did it… on our own. Some email services provide you some space to create your own on their server… we opted to pay about $50 for a full year to register and keep www.mikeandterra.com - and I think down the line - it will come in quite handy for both of us. That is… if we ever find the time to work on it again. Heehee.

Mike luckily knows a thing or two about HTML and website creation - so he was able to make what you see on the website possible. For those of you interested in doing it yourselves - I recommend 2 programs to help - FrontPage by Microsoft (preferably the newest version) or Dreamweaver (a much more expensive and complex program) but you can download a trial version off their website for free. Building it requires you to think about many things you would never notice on another website or even knew existed. Kind of like how our H2B’s feel when we say “I’ll have my CBM have the same color roses as me, and the other BM’s a different color so that she will stand out…” He’s usually pretty blank faced when you share these types of thoughts with him isn’t he? Well, that’s how I looked when he asked me what color scheme we wanted for our website buttons. Huh? What a dilemma for us… I remember going back and forth with Mike about the 3 different colors of our menu items… now I know none of you have noticed… but if you look on our sub category buttons… it’s white text… then when you roll your mouse over it, it turns to gray, then when you click on it… it goes gold. We could not agree on the bloody colors for over an day… I don’t know why it became so troublesome… but I soon learned quickly - as many H2B’s learn… let the ‘expert’ plan and create… I’ll just speak when spoken too. :o)

But I did care about the content. I am responsible for all the content you see… who/what/when/where/why… I came up with the formatting and ‘advised’ Mike on how it should look. We obviously made some compromises along the way and still have plenty of content to add… but it’s a work in progress… we put up info as our wedding guests need to know it… no one needed to know about our wedding list when we started… but now… I suppose we should add it. (which by the way is still an appropriate way, etiquette speaking of course - of letting people know where your list is.)

So I guess my point is… it’s VERY time consuming - it’s a great thing to do with your H2B - it gets both of you involved… but beware… it could also cause frustration between the 2 of you from time to time - don’t let it get the best of you… it’s meant to be a FUN project.

Why it’s useful? It gets our wedding guests involved before the wedding… they get to know us better, know our friends & family… if you have guest traveling such as us… it’s a GREAT opportunity to help them with information on travel/accommodations. It’s an early invitation with a lot more detail and info. And it’s a great way to let everyone know what may be happening before or after the wedding.

And even better down the line… Perhaps say in 5 years… an electronic baby book for our first born… so the possibilities are endless.

All the hard work does pay off and it gets easier as you go. All of it.

Ta Ta For Now!

Terra