I think wedding websites are a really great idea. Especially for us, as we had guests living in England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa. It is such a quick, easy, and cheap way to keep guests informed, not only about the details of your wedding, but also about any pre-wedding events, changes in plans, and what's going on with the planning. It's also a great place to put up photos and provide simple ways for people to get in contact with you.

Nick and I made our website together. There are lots of free wedding websites out there, but they didn't offer the flexibility and designs we were looking for. There are also lots of paid for wedding websites, which are pretty good too, but can be costly and again don't allow you complete control over design and content. So, being IT geeks and in my case a design freak, I designed the site and Nick coded it in php.

I incorporated our colour scheme and frangipani theme, and tried to give it a really fun, fresh, beach feel. We bought the domain name charmayneandnick.com to make it easy for guests to remember, or find, our URL. I did all the content and added loads of information, here's a screenshot of the homepage:

We sent out traditional RSVP cards in our invitation suite but also added the URL to the online RSVP page of our site to the cards - almost everyone used the online RSVP. On the online RSVP form I also added fields to RSVP to our pre-wedding Welcome Luau and asked guests to request songs to be played on the dancefloor at the wedding. People really loved that they had a say in the song list and everyone requested at least one song. My maid of honour's fiance loved the idea so much they are going to do it too for their wedding. I think it's a great idea as that way everyone will hear at least one song they like and will want to dance to.

I found a great free photo album plugin called phpGraphy and we put up pics from our engagement, engagement party and pics of our wedding venue. Another great free tool I used was MJGuest which is a really nice guestbook. I also added a Google calendar from our Google account to show different events and important dates for the convenience of our guests. I researched what airlines fly to Honolulu from each country that our guests would be coming from, and approximately how much flights would cost and put that in the Travel to Hawaii section. I asked our wedding planner to recommend some hotels in Waikiki and added those plus others to suit different budgets on the Accommodation page. The Coach to Venue page shows pick up points for the coach we will be providing to take our guests from Waikiki to the wedding venue (as the venue is about an hour or so away from Waikiki). I created a map in My Maps in our Google account to show the exact pick up points, which I embedded in the page. The Fun Things To Do section has some ideas of activities to partake in on Oahu such as surfing lessons, snorkelling, the best beaches to visit (with another of My Maps from Google!), places to shop and eat, and sites to visit like the Pearl Harbor Memorial. There is also a weather widget showing the current weather in Honolulu.

Our guests were impressed at the wealth of information on our site and have found it really useful - it's been a great way to communicate with our guests. We'll keep it up and running after the wedding as well and we'll add some photos from the big day. I think the website will serve as a great momento of our wedding!