It was early 2011. The dress had arrived, the colors had been chosen, and the venue was booked. Now, all I had to do was finalize the guest list and send the invitations. Oh yeah, and we needed a website.
I searched all around the Internet for a good wedding website creator. The stuff I found was…how should I put this…not my style. A few examples, all from different notable companies offering their own website creation tools:
A few things came to my mind as I was browsing these sites:
– Wait, people still use clip art on websites?
– Seriously? 20 navigation links on a single site?
– The music! Oh, the blaring music… please, make it stop.
– Are we back in the MySpace era?
It was clear to me that I was going to have to design my own wedding site.
I started dreaming about what the ultimate wedding website would be: a visually beautiful, easy-to-navigate destination on the web that connected all of my guests with each other and with all of the info they actually cared about. Knowing all of the possibilities that the Facebook API has to offer, I knew it would be pretty simple to build the site of my dreams.
Once our site was finished, my fiancé and I sent the link around to our guests and were amazed at the reaction! Our guests were able to see who they should meet at the wedding based on their common interests and friends, tell personal stories about us (the bride and groom), and even cooler, edit their own personal profile page to declare where they were staying, what their cell phone number was, when they were arriving, and more.
I’m pretty sure our single friends loved the site the most — we used a feature called “Flirt” to show them all the other single people who were coming and suggested who should meet based on the things they had in common — after all, research proves that common friends are the primary introducers of married couples ;)
Our wedding site was so much of a hit, in fact, that several of our engaged friends asked if they could use the code for their own wedding site. Thus, the idea for Weduary began.
Weduary makes it easy for any bride and groom to build a social and beautiful wedding website in minutes. The first of many software offerings from us here at Brit & Co., Weduary is designed with a DIY spirit in mind — you can personalize your entire site, from the domain name, to the registry info, to your custom color palette. Our goal is to do for wedding sites what Tumblr did for blogs and what Paperless Post did for online invitations. We are kicking things off with 10 beautiful themes to choose from (sorry Clip Art Fans, this isn’t the place for you), and will be adding more as often as we can work with designers to make them.
The site is social from the ground up. Once you log in with your Facebook account, we’re able to detect your spouse and enable you both to import photos you already have of yourselves on Facebook. You can invite your guests to the site via Facebook or by email. Once your friends log in, they’ll be able to RSVP to events, see who to meet (and potentially flirt with), tell stories, and more.
Not a bride or groom? Weduary is for you, too. As an invited guest to 10 (count them, ten!) weddings this year, I know just how hard it is to keep track of all of my friends’ wedding dates, sites, RSVPs and registries. If your engaged friends are using Weduary, you’ll be able to keep track of all the weddings you’re invited to in one spot on the web, thus ensuring you never have to ask questions like “where is their wedding?” ever again. We’ll be adding more guest features soon — stay tuned!
