a work in progress

We want to have a website, Mr. UB & I. You know ... for the wedding. Not because people need to know every stinkin' detail about our lives *cough i do that here cough*, but for practical purposes. And by practical, I mean to keep things within our budget.

1) Save-The-Dates: Yes, I'm still adamantly refusing to refer to these by their acronym. Also, to paraphrase the marvellous Ania, we are in a new millenium and there's nothing tacky about an electronic Save-The-Date. Especially if we use it to introduce our website, which will be chock-full of oh-so-much useful information (see below). I don't plan on doing anything as generic as an eVite, mind you. I'll be putting my photoshop skillz to use & making a lovely PDF image.

Also, no paper or postage costs for this round.

2) RSVPs: According to many recent wedding veterans, a disturbingly high percentage of the rsvp cards that are mailed out with return postage already on it simply do not come back. I don't know why. Nobody seems to. But I'm not keen on spending extra monies on a) little cards, b) little envelopes, and c) postage (again) just to have it thrown away. If I'm going to have to pester people with calls/emails to get their yay or nay -- and from what I hear, I will -- then please don't make me also have to stuff the gigantic "grrrrr!" back down my throat. I don't edit myself well. Seriously.

3) Stuff we don't want to include in the invitations: Things like maps, hotel info, and whatever else I haven't even been told about yet that we're "supposed to include" ... Really? People are actually this together in their planning process? There's nothing they've left out/forgotten/spaced on, by the day the invites get mailed? Interesting. Where does one find such people, as I've never met any?

4) Registry: I can't decide which is sillier -- the idea of registering for gifts ("buy us this!") or the hubbub surrounding how to, and especially how NOT to, let people know the damned registry exists. So it'll be on the website. Done.

At first glance, it seems like there are lots of resources out there to create a free wedding website. However, upon further inspection, "free" has a variety of definitions. The most common one seems to be We'reTooCheapToPayForTheUpgrade.com/OurNamesHere. No way am I putting that on the invitations I've poured blood, sweat and tears into. Hell to the No. In all of my searching, I couldn't find a single hosting site that lets you have OurNames@OurWedding.com without an annual fee. And none of those are cheap.

So: Plan B. Build us a website. Daunting, but I've done it twice before. Of course, my computer had its "memory incident" since then, and while I managed to save all my data (phew!) I lost many of my programs. Which just means I have to figure out how to use iWeb.

I registered our domain name (and got the exact one I wanted, thank you) for $2.19. And the hosting of our site for 1 year is $56.88. Still not free, but a lot less than the $100 average on other sites, and I have total creative control. Also, we can keep the domain name after the wedding & use it for general info about us. For anyone who cares, that is -- whatever, it's still a non-disposable item, even if it is electronic, and that pleases me.

I uploaded the first version today -- some of the links are a little wonky, and I haven't quite sussed out how to make my updated pages get from my laptop file to the interwebs, but it does exist. And that has to be worth something. Right?

Check us out if you're interested: JessAndJudd.com
Domain registry & site hosting via GoDaddy.com