My wedding website
Introduction #
Although there are plenty of wedding website generators out there, I wanted to design and build my own wedding website, one that would be unique to my now-husband's and my love story. The website needed to let our gorgeous engagement photos (taken by Lunalee Photos) shine, while also telling our story and giving guests the information they would need for our big day.
Process #
I first designed the website in Figma since I was familiar with using it from design hand-offs at work. Considering this was my wedding website, my main "client" for this project was my now-husband, so I was able to use Figma to present him with multiple layout options until we both agreed on what we wanted.
For the website's CSS, I chose to try out Tailwind CSS which was fairly new at the time but was quickly becoming popular for use in quick weekend side projects like this would be. I had a lot of fun trying it out because I always nerd out about new frontend frameworks, but I wouldn't choose to use Tailwind for any future projects. For someone like me who genuinely enjoys writing custom CSS, Tailwind simply didn't offer any benefits to me over writing my own CSS selectors. I found myself having to constantly look through the documentation to find a specific Tailwind selector that I could have written the CSS for myself in half the time.
Outcome #
In 2019, we sent out the URL for our wedding website on our save-the-dates, and our wedding guests loved it! I was planning to update the website closer to our wedding day with even more details, but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic put our wedding planning, and more importantly, everyone's lives on hold. In the end, we were forced to cancel our September 2020 wedding and instead have a small elopement ceremony, but I'm still so proud of the wedding website I built.
If I were to complete this project today, there are some things I'd change about it. I now know that I'd prefer to write my own CSS rather than use Tailwind, and I'd pay much closer attention to the accessibility of the website. However, I'm so glad I took on the challenge in 2019 as it was a fun opportunity to share my love for building websites with my closest family and friends.