I always found the concept of a whole website, domain name, etc dedicated to a wedding to feel a little... heavy. I understand it's a big occasion. It just feels like a lot for a single event and domain that will become irrelevant after the event is over.
Eh, I’ve built websites for much stupider reasons than a wedding and its not like a domain name is expensive/difficult to acquire/unacquire.
I mean hell the wedding invite card is going to require much more work/thought than this site, and it’ll be used even less (assuming the site is intended as an informational reference; the card will be used exactly once: to formally invite
1) The average middle class or upper middle class wedding is several hundred people
2) Vegetarian / Non vegetarian food preferences are helpful to estimate costs and convey to the caterer
3) Choice of alcohol preference is useful because you are only allowed to serve alcohol if you buy a permit and every bottle is tagged and photographed by the excise department in some cases. Most weddings do not serve alcohol, but those that do are usually helped by including a alcohol preference question.
4) Destination weddings are increasingly common, or the wedding will take place in only one venue i.e. the bride or groom's hometown. In this case it's common to rent hotel rooms for the entire opposite side of the guest list. For this, having a digial RSVP is useful to organise rooms.
5) For Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, a wedding typically involves multiple days of ceremonies and meals with multiple venues for each one. Sometimes people will attend all. Sometimes they will attend only a few.
For events of that size, organising information is a big deal, and having enough of a heads up helps manage costs and be better prepared.
The website will be irrelevant in a year, but just the RSVP feature can potentially be extremely helpful.
Once you have the RSVP stuff in place, the map and other stuff just becomes basic pages that you may as well put in place.
Yeah but men basically go insane when trying to impress women. The entire concept of a wedding is insane. That much time, effort and money for something that essentially amounts to a few photographs, most of which are fake and posed. A man wouldn't buy this for himself.
That's even worse. I was giving them more credit but maybe you're right. The wedding industry thrives by sowing the idea of a perfect and unique wedding into the minds of little girls and later some man will come along and fulfil that dream.
I wouldn't buy dolls, and after, their clothing either. Yet my daugthers love them and I love my daugthers. I wouldn't buy expensive jewelry, yet my wife loves it everyday still.
There is so much you wouldn't do for yourself but do for the ones you love. That doesn't make it insane or just to not disappoint. You do it because it makes you happy to see them happy. If you would do the same if you were alone is not the thing that matters here.
The project which I have linked here won't cost you a dime to set up. It will be hosted on github.com for free. My site is hosted on github too. No servers needed. Github also provides you with a default domain which you can use (and it recently started supporting https as well).
You only pay around $10 if you need your own custom domain.
I wasn't questioning the price --and I get that static sites are fairly trivial to create and host-- just the idea of a full-blown website for a wedding.
The thing is, a website these days isn't a huge amount of effort if you're already a web developer, and it's not a huge cost to register a domain - certainly far cheaper than even the most basic Fancy Paper Invitations.
It certainly has that nice decentralised feel to it, as opposed to having an official Facebook event. Or using one of the "wedding app" companies.
