Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.Using WordPress to Build a Wedding Website
I’m a blogger and designer by trade. I studied magazine journalism in college. But graduating into a world where people don’t read newspapers led me on the path to writing for online media, so a lot of what I know about blogging and websites is self-taught. I taught myself how to build and run a self-hosted WordPress blog when I launched the lifestyle blog Formal Fringe, for instance. And now that knowledge is coming in handy for our wedding.
Instead of using one of the out-of-the-box services for our wedding websites, I’m tackling it from scratch with WordPress. I know WordPress is a blogging platform, but it’s actually a pretty rich base for building websites. I have a self-hosted site (which means I load the WordPress files to my own server with a web hosting company, you’ll see it referred to as “WordPress.org”), but you can tackle the same thing publishing with WordPress.com (Think mywebsite.wordpress.com, although you can use a custom domain for a small extra cost).
Once you have WordPress set up or installed, all that’s needed to turn a “blog” into more of what we think of as a “website” is a good theme. It’s like the paint job on a car. Some are free, some cost a little, some cost a lot, but there’s literally a bajillion WordPress themes out there. All you have to do is look (and Google is your friend, here). Many of the paid themes also offer customer support, so amateur brides can get help when they hit a technical speed bump.
Theme Fuse
A premium wedding WordPress theme from Theme Fuse.
You don’t have to select a “wedding” theme at all. Load a theme with the style you like for your wedding, and start customizing it with your own headlines, words and photos. You’ll be impressed at how quickly and easily it comes together.
The theme I settled on for our wedsite is called Photo from WPExplorer. It’s free (awesome) and responsive, which means that the layout of each page adjusts for anybody viewing it on a phone or tablet. I just loved how clean it was, and how much room there was for photos and content without a sidebar.
You might decide you want a sidebar, or a photo gallery, or any number of things, and there’s probably a WordPress theme out there that has it. All you’ve got to do is get out there and try them on. Going the WordPress route almost guarantees you’ll never see another wedding website quite like yours, which if you ask me is a huge advantage over turn-key sites. Is there anybody else who just likes to be different?
