Setting up a wedding website is a great way to share a lot of information and the easiest way to streamline the RSVP process! You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t trying to be smart and save yourself time, so good on you, you’re in the right place.
In this video, I’ll walk you through how to use the website builder to create a beautiful and useful website that is going to help you streamline communication with your guests.
The first thing that you’ll want to do is choose a template. What makes WedSites unique is that our templates are entirely customizable, so what you see on the page isn’t a cookie cutter template that you need to stick to.
As a matter of fact, you can completely change the layout, colors, fonts, and add your own calligraphy, illustration, photos, and other graphic elements to make a one-of-a-kind website.
Choosing a template is an excellent way to get started, so I’m going to customize this template to show you what I mean.
Click on the "Site Settings" button to pull up this panel which has a bunch of different options for you to customize your site.
Starting with the “Design” tab, you can change the colors and even simplify the design if you want a more typographical focused look. Which brings me to “Fonts”, this is where you can change the different fonts shown throughout your website.
The “Menu” tab is all about your navigation menu, from here you can choose what is displayed in your navigation menu so guests can easily jump to different sections of your website.
If you are creating a multi-page website, which I’ll show you how to do very soon, those pages will also appear under here so you can direct guests to the other pages within your website.
If you have created a custom logo, emblem, or have custom calligraphy that you’d like to use in place of the default style your names are in, you can replace that by uploading the image in the “Upload custom calligraphy (single line)” section.
There is also the option to display a RSVP link in your menu by toggling this option here.
Next is the “Header” tab, this is another place where you can upload your own header image above the section your names are shown.
I’ve seen a lot of couples upload a beautiful photo of themselves here, but that’s totally up to you! If you want to replace the names that are displayed by default, you can “Upload custom calligraphy (stacked)” and what you see will be completely replaced with your own graphic.
You can adjust how much space you want above and below your names in the header section. And finally, you also have the option to upload a header background behind your names.
This option here is just for the header section, but if you want to apply a background image behind the text of your entire website, you can find that option in the “Background” tab.
So these are where you can find the different customization options for the template you’ve chosen, but you can further customize your site by changing the sections you see within your site.
Everything you see on the website is composed of different section types which you can see by going to the “Add section” link up at the top of the builder. These are the building blocks of your website and you can get really creative with how you want to display the information on your site.
I’ll quickly run through the different sections you have here:
Header: Adding a section title and menu item. This is useful when you want to break up the information on your website.
Paragraph: A block of text within your site
Quote: This is great for sharing a welcome message or displaying a quote on your site. It’s a block of text that's formatted a bit differently than the paragraph section.
Image: This is what you’ll use for uploading one or more photos onto your site. You can use the image section to upload multiple images at a time to create a photo gallery and change the look by resizing each image.
Link: When you want to link to an external website
Button: A button that you can use to link to an external website
Page divider: This will place a horizontal line to separate sections with the site.
Black space: This is useful for creating empty space and centering smaller images.
Place: If you have hotels, restaurants, activities, or any other recommendation for your guests to visit, the place section is what you’ll want to use to share information about that establishment.
Map: This will put a Google map on your site
Timeline: You can use this to create a schedule of events on your site. You may want to use this to give your guests insight into what they can expect and when each event you have planned will start.
Wedding party: To introduce your wedding party! You can upload a photo for each of your bridal party members and a short bio to help your guests get to know the who’s who at the wedding.
Gift registry: This will give you the option to add links and logos to your different wedding registries. It’s similar to the Link and Button section types, but it gives you the option to upload the logo of your chosen registry and a bit more information about where you’ve registered, whether that’s a retail store, charity, or cash registry.
Countdown: This will display a countdown widget displaying the number of days until your wedding day.
Guestbook form: This section will create a digital guestbook on your website where guests can upload a photo and share a message with you! This is perfect if you’re thinking about hosting a virtual wedding and don’t want to miss out on collecting special messages from your family and friends.
The Video & live streaming sections are all about embedding videos and/or a live stream of your wedding on your wedding website. We support YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, Zoom, and Event Live, but as long as the platform you’ve chosen has given you a URL or HTML embed code, you can add it to your WedSites wedding website.
For advanced users, you can also use the HTML code section to add your own custom HTML code.
When you hover over your website, you’ll notice each section highlights and you’ve got these icons that appear in each corner.
The icon top left corner is when you want to hold and drag a section around the page,
the bottom left icon is for moving the section up or down by one section at a time,
the bottom right icon is to change the size of the section,
and the top right is to actually edit the content shown within that section.
When you click on the navigation menu, you’ll be taken to each of the sections on the homepage or a completely different page, like I’ve done with my “Virtual Wedding” page here.
So next, let’s go over how to create a new page on your website.
Go up to the “Add page” link, and you’ll get a blank page that you can start adding sections to!
For this tutorial, I’ll create a “Guestbook” page to show you how this all works. I’ll add the guestbook section, add some text and save.
Now this page still hasn’t been published yet, so I’m going to go into the “Page settings” to publish. Now that this page has been published, I will be able to find this page within the available navigation links from the Site settings button > Menu section we talked about earlier in this video.
If you’ve created a new page and not finding it in the navigation links here, that’s probably because the page hasn’t been published yet so just keep that in mind.
If you have created multiple pages for your website, you can reorder the pages by clicking and dragging them from this section here which is only visible to you inside of the builder.
Once you’re happy with the way it looks, you can click on “View site” to see what it looks like.
If all looks good, you’re ready to hit the “Publish site” button and your site goes live!
As you continue planning your wedding, you’ll start finalizing details and new things will pop up.
The great thing about having a wedding website is that it is dynamic, which means you can continue to make changes as you lock in your plans without having to unpublish your site.
You can make changes to your site whenever you want to, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect yet.
The most important thing is sharing the crucial details with your guests which are the date, time, location, and a way for them to RSVP.
As you can see there’s quite a lot you can do with your wedding website and you can get really creative with it!
We have heaps of resources on how to create a great wedding website and some fantastic wording examples that you can get some inspiration from, so I’ll be sure to include the links to those resources here: