20.5 years ago I sent out a link to a party celebrating our engagement. I spent more time explaining how to get to the website, than people finding website helpful.
I got married almost 3 years ago and wanted to do the same but i would have end up like you. Printing is expensive!
For my Bachelorette party I send an image as invitation by WhatsApp.
Nice job with the design/layout... that is a great way to present it. Also, nice move with the red envelope request, cash is _way_ better than useless wedding gifts.
I totally agree with this, but my wife and her mother insisted on registering for gifts, because "some people prefer to give gifts". We hardly use the stuff we got and half of it is still in the box at her mother's house, because we don't have room for it.
very nice timeline, I'm curious to see how the sources look like! That kind of page could be easily templated, with something like a yaml file describing the content, and what ever being to generate the static website!
8 years ago:
what: Our first date
where: Auckland, NZ
photos:
Camping trip: ...
Roadtrip: ...
I just went to my old wedding domain name to see if it was still up (www.paulandtessa.com) and it turns out another couple bought it for their wedding next February. Amazingly, they are from the same city as us (Long Beach). I'm not sure what the chances of that happening considering anyone in the world could have bought it. It's a good thing I didn't renew the domain name so that someone else could enjoy it for their guests. Keep that it mind when you are gobbling up domain names for important life events ;)
great story. highly unlikely coincidence. same names and wedding at the same city. domain names can have different easy to remember permutations and there are different top level domains so it's likely the couple would've registered something similar. overall good advice on not keeping it permanent, although I could understand some people turning it into a family business or something.
Heh, rent our domain for $5 a month! Or, buy the homepage, just send us pictures and captions, and pick one of our templates... Would probably work best for highly common name combinations.
I still find the idea of a digital wedding invitation pretty strange, because here in Hungary the bride and the fiancé invite everybody in person together. Maybe distant relatives are invited by mail or something.
Is digital invitation a common thing nowadays? Or was it more common even years ago in other countries?
The tradition for many in the US (in my experience, at least—it's far from universal, of course) is that the paper invitation is considered "official"—often even more-so than an in-person invite. In-person invites are still welcome, of course, but they're often seen as informal.
Since a mailed invitation is already considered by many to be the most formal route, it makes sense that electronic invites have gained popularity—especially for those looking to save money (printing fancy invitations and mailing them easily costs hundreds of dollars).
When I got married in 2006, we sent paper invitations with postage-paid RSVP response cards. They were custom-printed by a local printer. Between printing and postage costs, we must have spent over $500 on invitations alone. This was for a very traditional wedding in Michigan.
Not kidding. And once a print shop catches a whiff that it's for a wedding the price goes waaaaay up.
We're doing digital invites by default and paper invites for family that who would get frustrated trying to use one. Cheaper, better for the environment, most people think it's neat, and it's a fun project.
As others have said, in the US the formal paper invite is considered official. When my wife and I married we still did this but we encouraged people to RSVP via the website or email. No sense in sending more paper.
It’s sad to me that we felt so pressured to do the paper invites. They’re ridiculously overpriced and all of that paper and emissions for delivery for something that can easily be delivered electronically and instantly for near zero cost.
The entire wedding industry thrives on norms like these and it’s amazing to me that technology doesn’t displace more aspects.
>> It’s sad to me that we felt so pressured to do the paper invites
Doesn't the entire wedding industry basically revolve around "encouraging" everyone to do a whole bunch of stuff that's either unneccessary, over-complex or simply over-priced?
Remember, this isn't a vendor from the evil wedding industry that forced them to do that, most likely a bunch of family members. The wedding industry is well and alive because of families and people that want to keep it alive! We kept telling everyone we didn't need or want a wedding cake. Well we ended up with a wedding cake, paid for by the sister in law, because she couldn't sleep at night thinking there wouldn't be a cake.
Well, it's a bit of both. Why are diamond engagement rings a thing? A vast, hideously expensive and massively successful marketing campaign. The same goes for a lot of it; people push this stuff because marketers have told them it's required.
Looks like the CO2 emissions of sending a letter are 25 grams or so. Meanwhile, an email with a 1 MB attachment is estimated to emit 19 grams of CO2 [1]. I think the real numbers might be off by a factor of 3 or more - there are so many variables: opening the email on a desktop PC and watching a video and sending it to friends would use much more, and maybe you mail the invitation to someone who doesn't get much mail and lives out of the way so the mailman has to drive 5 more minutes just for one letter.
In any case, the CO2 emissions of the invite are negligible compared to other things: say on the night of sending the invitations you have a lamb dinner with your fiance and you each eat 12 oz of lamb, that dinner was responsible for 27 kg of CO2 emissions vs. 120 invitations would be only 3.5 kg.
In turn, that would be far less emissions than feeding everyone 12 oz of lamb (1607 kg of CO2), which would be far less emissions than that produced by the guests arriving (say 7% take transatlantic and 28% take cross-country flights, all economy) - a whopping 73920 kg CO2 [2].
Not to derail, but that estimate for carbon footprint of email seems extremely high. I believe your link is referencing a 2010 book's figures [1], which A. surely have declined in 8 years and B. seem suspect, given Netflix's 2014 claims of 300g avg yearly carbon impact per customer.
How do you let people know about the website? Social media posts? How do you contact people not on social media about the website? A mailer? A phone call/text? These are just questions I would ask to understand why paper invitations are still a thing. Rather than providing a self addressed stamped envelope for the RSVP, just put the website into it.
Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
> How do you let people know about the website? Social media posts? How do you contact people not on social media about the website? A mailer? A phone call/text?
Someone should invent some kind of electronic mail for these things!
> Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
My wife and I did email invitations because we didn't consider it worth $500 for someone to have something to stick on their fridge. We were able to automatically send an email reminder a week or two ahead of time instead.
Do you have the current postal mailing adresses of all of your friends? I certainly don't, so I'd have to call them or write them on social media first just to get the address.
Nine years ago I made a wedding site with Wordpress but sent invitees either the URL or a traditional paper invitation for those that appreciate that touch. When everyone is around the country or even several other countries it would be impractical to visit everyone in person. We didn’t have much money and financed the wedding entirely ourselves so this was necessary as well.
Yes, sites are the best way to get information for weddings IMO.
What we did was: send out an invitation and it had the date + website (no other info) so people HAD to go on the website to get that information.
I love the idea of the couple inviting everyone in person, I would've loved to do that too. We invited close family and friends so would've been obvious.
We did the same. Paper + only date & website link. Worked out awesome. Then you can update the site as people ask questions or need more detailed info, etc.
We sent very carefully hand-crafted invitations to all our guests in the mail. We did a wedding website to get the RSVP's, as we live in a different country to many of our guests so postal RSVP's would have been difficult (we sometimes have issues receiving mail here). The website was also a great information point on how to get to our venue.
So basically a bit of old and a bit of new. It worked well :)
Interesting! I assume most of the invitees live locally then?
My wife and I sent invitations to friends and family in 6 countries on 3 continents, so inviting everyone in person would have been impractical. We didn't expect eg. her extended family in Chile to actually show up, but we wanted to formally invite them anyway so they would know we were thinking of them.
We did actually have attendees from two continents and four countries though.
Thanks for sharing. I just got married and did my own site - I forgot how time consuming even a regular HTML / CSS static site could be when you have a million other things going on - I would have loved to have used this.
I got married last month and thought about doing a site for a while (I just may still make one just for her sake with all the wedding pictures) but being a full-time web developer I knew it wouldn't just be slap on some pictures and HTML/CSS. I cannot tell you how many times I've struggled with CSS or JS and I use both daily! They're painful lessons, sometimes too easy to forget when you leave the front-end.
It's not nearly as pretty as all the others here, but I am a backend developer, not a designer. You cat get the source code at https://github.com/sandermarechal/wedding
> This event is no way close to ethnic. The bride & groom would like to have some "shots before the knot". With booze flowing down the floor and the western attire on, everyone would be busy showing off their new moves on the stage which they have finely honed. Lastly, expect some beer pong matches & karaoke for sure.
The money quote. I would have loved to have gone to this wedding!
Indeed. The whole site exudes a nonchalance and cultural pluralism that just makes me think I'd have had heaps of fun attending, despite being from the other end of the globe and another background entirely.
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.
There's no gender specific wording anywhere on the open sourced website, or in the parent post, so the parent's regex works regardless of who's doing the regexing.
People who haven't encountered both in writing (or perhaps who have, and dismissed them as alternate spellings) may not realize that the homophones fiancé and fiancée are actually two separate gender-differentiated terms (where the former is both the male-specific and gender-neutral one) and not one gender-neutral term that some people, perhaps incorrectly, spell differently.
I don't know anyone who uses fiancee in a gendered way; all my engaged friends refer to their future husband/wife as their fiancee (though, granted, I'm probably not as old as many here who are already wed so I might just be out of the loop). Google's definition of fiancee seems to offer both wife-to-be and husband-to-be as synonyms as well, so I'm not really sure the parent's sneer is really valid in this case.
The word fiancé/fiancée is gendered. It is one of the few gendered words in English, as the gender was not dropped in taking it from French. Fiancé refers to the male. Fiancée refers to the female. They are pronounced exactly the same, which is why you have never heard it.
Words with semantic, but not grammatical, gender are not uncommon in English which lacks grammatical gender. Fiancé and fiancée are separate English words with different semantic gender, based on different grammatical gender forms from French (which, unlike English, does have grammatical gender.)
> Fiancé refers to the male. Fiancée refers to the female.
Actually, following French where male grammatical gender is used when the actual gender of the referent is unknown, fiancé is also the generic term.
The technicality here is that “fiancée” is historically female while “fiancé” is historically male. Same word, same pronunciation different suffix. Either way, nothing to get hung up about.
TIL there's a separate term for the male in this case.
Looking it up, it appears the distinction between fiancé (for the man) and fiancée (for the woman) has been falling out of style.
This isn't helped by the fact that the distinction in spelling is, apparently, taken directly from French and that both words are pronounced the same way.
Actually women have been promoted to a supervisory role when it comes to wedding planning, so likely the groom would be tasked with the grunt work of dealing with the website.
Had an idea to make a website for my wedding too (married one year ago), but in the end, decided to go with traditional paper invitations as would be difficult to explain to older people how to RSVP and paper invitations would be more cost-efficient (By comparing the time needed to build the website with my hourly rate).
For big Indian weddings with hundreds of people, I do see that the website can benefit by not needing to contact each person about RSVP status.
At a traditional indian wedding, you don't invite people. You tell your aunts and uncles and friends, and they tell their aunts and uncles and friends, and they tell theirs, etc, until you end up with 800 people at your wedding.
At $25-50+ a head for food and alcohol at reception alone, that is a huge number unless you come from wealth... However I think I read somewhere the average cost of South Asian wedding is $100-150k in California. Ouch.
Indian weddings have this notion of 'Full family' and 'couple' invite string in wedding cards to limit the no. of people. Usually people go in person to invite people to wedding.
How does the "RSVP to google sheets" work? That's an extremely useful feature to have on a static site with no backend. It looks like it's related to this line:
I don't know how the wedding website works, but I've done some basic recording data to google sheets like so:-
1. Create 'google forms' one-page survey, gathering outputs into a spreadsheet.
2. Use browser debug tools to figure out form field names, which will be things like 'entry.1150050082'
3. curl "https://docs.google.com/forms/d/ 1xFOZk3D1...wnIjGAf0/formResponse?ifq&entry.1150050082=FOO&entry.1477423851=BAR&entry.592766186=BAZ&submit=Submit" or the appends a row to the google sheet with the values FOO, BAR and BAZ.
I assume if your site embedded a form that sent the same request as that curl query, it would do the same thing.
Obviously, this isn't going to win you any awards for highly maintainable professional design at work. But if you want something quick and you aren't fussed about whether it works a year from now, it can get the job done.
It would be quite easy to check the rsvp code in appscript.
E.g. have a sheet with all the guests, and give a random number (rsvp code) to each guest.
Then on each rsvp request you could check whether that rsvp code exists in the code column.
If yes: you'll add the answer to that row.
If no: return an error.
Yes, that's correct for my site currently. But what I had in mind is to have the invite code in the sheet itself and then when one submits, I check the entered code with the code in the sheet and then add/not add the rsvp.
However, due to timing constraints, I couldn't do this and instead used a simple encryption algorithm to have the hacker at least put in some effort to know the invite code :)
Wow, all these wedding websites here look amazing. Ours was a really simple static webpage which I hacked together in a single day. At least our guests loved it :) http://hetalsaidyes.com
However, I shall say that we made the website for convenience, we still sent out letters with a formal invitation. The website was more like a place for people to quickly check details and later to distribute photos by guests.
For my wedding I tried to not have any technology on me for photos. I always feared having a great photo like that one - but then it can look "dated" with an iPhone 6 in it.
Without that iPhone, that photo could be from anytime 1950-2020!
Nice! One thing about the RSVP, it has a section where you can specify the number of "Wife or kids" you are bringing. Probably could be reworded to something more neutral.
I used a service called withjoy.com about 279 days ago :-)
I primarily went to the service instead of a storied page because I needed a system to collect RSVPs. I could have hacked one up together, but this service offered everything I wanted, in a easy way, so I made the choice.
[Off-topic] I feel there is a need of many more open source projects. Most open source projects these days are backed by big cos. There are hardly any large open source projects nowadays which are not by big cos. Why is there no credible alternative to Uber which is open source ? How about open source stack for security software ?
Because it's not so easy to make a stable big software without lots of money and people. And only big corporations have that sort of money to spend on such things.
It’s not as polished as the poster but I’ve open sourced our wedding website should it help serve as inspiration for you https://github.com/intenscia/Wedding
Wow. Someone deleted my comment without any notice or whatever.
What kind of practice is this here on HN?
I was not offending the author or someone else.
I was just criticising the size of the repo and the number of tools that are required to develop this single static website in contrast to a simple html file. People started to upvote and agree with me and the reaction is to simply delete?
If this is the new practice here I'll have to ask myself if it makes sense to keep participating in this community.
I believe comments aren't removed here at all. There are some comments which are objectively useless/offending in many threads and they're just flagged but never deleted, so I doubt they'd remove yours when it's a valid technical critique (if perhaps it can be expressed less harshly).
It's not that complex. You can have a paypal.me address or set up a stripe account with buymeacoffee.com. There would be many more but these two are at the top of my mind now.
Looking at the bloated and checked in node_modules folder makes me wanna cry. Yah it's probably all just dev dependencies but building a static website shouldn’t feel like rocket science. People were creating wedding websites in the 90s with just one html file and that’s it. Welcome to the age of total bloat.
> What is the alternative to tools like Gulp or Gatsby for those of us who want to make (fairly)simple websites?
Gulp has nothing directly to do with building a website, it is a compilation tool of sorts that allows you to transform your source files into something you'll end up deploying via various plugins. For example, you can use gulp to collapse all your JS source files into one or to transpile it into something more cross browser compatible.
The reason I dislike Gulp is that it has a massive number of dependencies and really is just an overcomplicated reimplementation of pipes. Personally, I prefer Webpack. It is also a fairly large tool, but at the very least it actually does something useful out of the box. When I migrated our projects from Gulp to Webpack, I replaced a over 500 lines of gulp code with about 50 lines of config and a small bash script.
Reasonable people interpret these things differently, but I'd say there were two gratuitous negativities: its snark, and venting an internet trope like "bloat on the web". I don't like bloat on the web either, but we've all heard countless rants about this already, and it's mean-spirited to haul out the artillery in this context.
Are you really sure you want to carry on swinging over the importance of HN accepting harsh criticism of someone's wedding site? I mean, it's a _wedding_ site. Maybe just let it go?
It is a policy violation or it isn't. You can't have it both ways because of sympathy confusion. At any rate, it doesn't matter. A moderator has already interjected.
I live in a world where the best of intentions is often responsible for entitlement and cataclysmic policy decisions. This has shaped the mode of thought amongst myself and my peers to what we call: bottom line up front, which is a cruel form of honesty. I appreciate that not everybody can encounter such thought forming experiences, but you are correct. The nature of deferring towards sympathy is the hardest challenge people in my circumstance face in adjusting from one world to another when the adjustment is required.
You sound like a "get off my lawn type of person"... let's take a look at the dependencies:
"animate.css" - as the name would imply, this is for css animations.
"font-awesome" - provides icons for vector graphics
"waypoints" - a easy way to trigger a function when you scroll to an element
This doesn't seem like "bloat". It's not like they used a full fledged framework like React. And, I think it would be pretty hard to replicate this site with "just one html file".
I'm sure its possible to make something similar without these 3 dependencies, but it would
The only reason node_modules is there in the repo is because I have hosted the website on github (via github pages) no personal server. And github pages doesn't support `npm install` if you know what I mean. So I need to have all the files in the repo for github to serve my website.
If you have a personal server then you do not need node_modules folder in your repo. You can just do `npm install` in your server.
20.5 years ago I sent out a link to a party celebrating our engagement. I spent more time explaining how to get to the website, than people finding website helpful.
Still married - so get off my lawn :)