An up-and-coming trend in the wedding industry is for couples to create personalized websites for their weddings. These wedding websites are excellent for gathering and sharing information related to the “big day.” They usually feature stories about the couple, directions to the ceremony and reception, guestbook posts, registry links and much more.
When we got married, we didn’t want to hire a wedding planner, so we looked to the Internet for online wedding tools that are available to everyone.The following is a list of the top 10 wedding websites, not in any particular order, with a summary of the pros and cons for each. We hope this is helpful. Best wishes for a beautiful wedding!
http://www.wedbuddy.com/
Wedbuddy.com offers several great features including e- invitations, guest management, photo and video upload, registry links and many other resources. Their wedding checklist feature might be the best out there. What we really liked about Wedbuddy is that their site is clutter-free, so you can focus on the tasks that are important for planning your "big day." Plenty of themes to choose from, integration with Facebook and an intuitive interface make this a great choice for quickly and simply planning and organizing your wedding.
http://www.weddingwindow.com/
This semi-free site is closely coupled with the popular Wed Loft blog. It allows the user to upload audio files in addition to photos, arrange a seating chart from their site, provide guests with accommodation ideas, and coordinate dates on an included calendar. One drawback is the difficulty of navigation compared to other sites. It's also not possible to upload more than one photo at a time, so creating an album could be a long, drawn-out process if you or your guests have a ton of pictures to share.
http://glosite.com/
Glo prides itself the most on its modern stationary e-invitation selections using Flash animation. They also host wedding websites, at a cost of $20-$30 monthly depending on the intimacy of the event and how complete of a package you prefer. In addition to guest management, RSVPs, theme selection, and customizing pages for photos, music, and other content, one of the distinguishing features touted on their website is the ability to create multiple "smart" events leading up the the wedding, which would only be visible to the guests who are invited to a particular lead-up event.
http://www.ewedding.com/
This is a fairly popular online wedding website builder. They provide similar features to most other wedding websites, such as RSVP management, story, photo albums, custom domain, etc. What is noteworthy is that even though they are not completely free, their pricing for premium features is reasonable. They offer a lot of features that you can turn on and off based on what pages you want to show on your website. Their designs are colorful, but we thought they were a little bit canned and outdated.
http://www.theknot.com/
TheKnot is a fantastic resource for everything wedding. It provides wedding planning tools and a personal website builder. They have a free and a premium version and both offer good features. There is a checklist feature that is customized based on your wedding date, a guest list, an online budget tool and more. There are also plenty of forums, blogs and a large online community all accessible through the site. Unfortunately, the resources on their site get buried in banners, boxes, and advertising; there is so much going on that it makes it very hard to navigate. This makes it a bit frustrating to find what you need to organize your wedding. Additionally, their email marketing is a bit excessive. But, all in all it has a lot to offer.
http://www.weddingchannel.com/
The WeddingChannel features a list of vendors that offer thousands of wedding products and services. Creating an account is free and easy to set up. Users have access to a handful of helpful, easy-to-use wedding tools. Their features include a planning checklist, a guest list manager, a budget calculator, a scrapbook and a personal wedding website for posting details and communicating with guests. These are all great tools for staying organized. WeddingChannel has a lot to offer but there is so much content and so many features that it can be difficult to find what you need.
http://www.weddingwire.com/
WeddingWire offers some really good online tools that help simplify the wedding planning process. You can compare different vendors by reading specific details about them. You can manage your wedding online, connect with other engaged couples and much more. They also have a very comprehensive checklist feature. There are a ton of wedding website themes to choose from, but we looked for hours and didn't find any that we really liked. The designs seem a little generic.
http://www.nearlyweds.com/
This is a site that offers an introductory free trial, but charges for hosting your wedding website thereafter. One of its stand-out features is that the engaged couple can customize the design for their site. This has the potential to make the look and feel of the couple's site highly personalized - but only if they have web development skills. There is also an abundance of theme options, however the quality of the themes might not be as stylish and romantic as a lot of their competitors.
http://www.weduary.com/
Weduary is a relatively new wedding website that is strictly intended for the Facebook community. Your wedding guests must have a Facebook account in order to RSVP. The site pulls information about the invitee's Facebook relationship status and provides the means whereby the guest community can check out who's single. Hence, they may try to mingle with each other before the big day. This adds a cool social aspect to an otherwise bare bones wedding website. The downside of this social media integration is that the organizing couple is left to deal with guest management of their non-Facebook family and friends by some other means entirely.
http://myevent.com/
MyEvent is another option for building your wedding website and sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and LinkedIn. MyEvent has over 60 themes, offering plenty of variety. However, many are not specifically for weddings, and are louder and more brightly colored than usual wedding themes. MyEvent has about a dozen features, including quizzes, polls, traveler accommodation information, and a page dedicated to introducing the honorary wedding party members. MyEvent is affordable at $9.95/month and definitely has the tools to make your wedding website a success.