Creating the Wedding Website

I consider myself to be fairly in-the-know when it comes to computers. (Give me an excel spreadsheet, and I will blow your mind!) But when it came to designing our website, I was a little clueless.

Image Via Frock On from Paramount's Clueless

Not really considering any other options, I initially set up one through The Knot; however, once I saw a few examples of what could be done by designing your own through Mac's program iWeb, I was no longer content with the minimal template options offered at the Knot.

I happened across a tutorial by Mrs. Cupcake. She is very thorough in the design aspects, which I found super-helpful given that I'd never used iWeb previously. I pretty much followed her directions to a T.

After completing the design aspects, I was a little lost. Mrs. Cupcake published her website with a .mac account, which is no longer in existence. MobileMe was created as its replacement, but it will soon be obsolete as well. I had no idea where to go from there. That's when I got my googling fingers ready and went to town!

From the research I've found, publishing without MobileMe can be time-consuming if you select the incorrect "helper" program (or FTP client, for you web savvy folks) to upload your iweb site. You may have to completely re-upload the entire site for any changes you make (rather than just refreshing your updates), which can take hours if you create a large site. But after trolling the internet, I found some great suggestions to combat this issue. (See tutorials using w2w from Simple Help, Macworld's youtube video using Easy iWeb Publisher, or Giumkie's video tutorial using Cyberduck and Transmit.) I ended up selecting Cyberduck as my FTP client and found it incredibly simple to use.

But don't let me get ahead of myself! Before you can upload your site, you have to figure out where you want it to be hosted. This was another area where I had no previous experience. There are only a million options out there! I was mainly concerned with price point since I didn't want to shell out an arm and a leg just to have a personalized site. I found several viable options: 1&1, My Hosting, Yahoo Web Hosting, Host Monster... (Next Advisor offers deals AND reviews here.) In the end, I decided to go with Go Daddy due to its name recognition, price, and vast options. Plus I found several help articles on their site for iWeb users. (With my inexperience, help is a necessity!)

When I initially looked at Go Daddy, it seemed overpriced compared to some of the alternatives, but if you google "go daddy" a banner ad should appear with a $1.99 hosting link. Now this is only valid for 3 months and then the price increases, but over 12 months it was comparable to the other hosts I found, and I liked the idea of having extra help if needed. Through Go Daddy (and the other hosts I listed above) you can also purchase a domain name (or personalized web address such as www.thehawkwedding.com).

So after purchasing my domain name and a hosting package from Go Daddy, I had to set up my hosting account. This was very straight-forward, but I didn't anticipate having to do this after paying for the package. Just go to your account, select web hosting under "My Products," and launch the control center. You'll have to pick an admin username and password before you can upload. Expect to wait at least 30 minutes to an hour after setting up your username before you can upload your site via FTP. (Go Daddy will email you a confirmation when you're ready to upload.)

Once I had the confirmation, I logged back into the control center so that I could have all of the FTP data I needed to input into Cyberduck. From there I went slowly through the tutorial again and followed the steps. Having a video was key with my inexperience. I found reading web jargon completely confusing! It only took about ten minutes once I launched Cyberduck to get my site uploaded and running! Sounds easy, right?

Screen shot of our site!

Did you attempt to make a website from scratch?