What Belongs on a Wedding Website

Most wedding websites are built as a scrapbook and used as a reference. Designing it for the second purpose reduces the volume of individual questions dramatically.

It exists to answer logistics

Guests visit a wedding website for a small number of reasons: where to be, when, what to wear, where to stay and how to get there.

Everything else, including the story of how the couple met, is decoration. It is welcome, but it is not why anyone opened the page.

The test is whether a guest can find the ceremony start time within a few seconds of arriving. Sites that fail this generate text messages for months.

Address the questions guests are embarrassed to ask

Several questions are asked privately because asking publicly feels rude, and answering them on the site removes the awkwardness entirely.

• Whether children are included
• Whether a guest may bring someone
• What the dress code actually means in practice
• Whether the ceremony is outdoors and on what surface
• Whether there is parking, and what it costs

Stating these plainly is kinder than leaving guests to guess, and it applies the same policy to everyone rather than to whoever asked.

Timing determines what it can hold

The site usually goes live with the save-the-dates, months before many details are settled, so it has to work while half-finished.

Marking a section as coming later is better than omitting it, because guests who find nothing about accommodations assume there is nothing to know.

Updating it as decisions are made keeps it authoritative. A site contradicting the invitation is worse than no site, and guests will believe whichever they saw last.

Privacy is a real consideration

A public site is indexed and readable by anyone, which is a poor place for a home address, a full guest list or detailed schedules of an empty house.

Password protection is standard on most platforms, and the password can be printed on the invitation, which limits the audience to invited guests.

Registry links sit awkwardly here. Most American guests expect them on the website rather than the invitation, which is why the site became the conventional home for them.

Where responses are collected

Online responses arrive faster and reduce the counting work, but they exclude guests who do not use the internet comfortably, which usually means the oldest relatives.

Running both, with a phone number for anyone who prefers to call, keeps the convenience without leaving people out.

Whatever the method, one person should own the resulting list, because two people entering responses into two places is how numbers stop matching.