As I’m getting super excited about going down to the shore this weekend to finish a few wedding projects, I thought I would share one that’s already been completed: our scrolling wedding website! :) First, I should note that I did not come up with this idea on my own. Before Mitch and I were engaged, I stumbled upon someone else’s wedding website through–hehe–“Stumbleupon” and fell in love with its design. (It scrolled from bottom to top, informing guests about their wedding plans. Nothing short of adorbs.) After Mitch proposed, I contacted the company that designed the website to ask if they might consider making us a similar one. While they said they’d happily take on the project, their quote was out of our price range. So we decided to take matters into our own hands!
The first step was drawing all the sea creatures for the homepage. This took time. I’m not the best artist, but I can copy simple drawings well enough. After I’d drawn everything we wanted to include, Mitch took photos of them using a iPhone app called “Genius Scan.” We–and by “we” I mean Mitch, as I was completely useless during this stage–then imported them into Photoshop, added color, and plopped them onto a very, very long Photoshop canvas with a gradient background. The process took about two weeks, but it was incredibly fun seeing the homepage slowly come to life.
Once the we had the homepage image finalized, it was time to tackle creating the actual website. We bought two domain names from GoDaddy (www.mitchandkelly.com and www.kellyandmitch.com) and enlisted one of our best friends, Shawn, to help bring the vision to life. Shawn is humble and will deny this, but he’s basically a web design genius. He installed WordPress–and a theme–for us, and then got to work, making fish and other sea creatures on the homepage “clickable” and making the site scroll from bottom to top. (Trickier than you’d think!) Shawn even had one of his friends from Etsy.com helping during this process! (I swoon for Etsy.)
Anyway, after only a day or two, Shawn magically had the site up and running, and it was time to upload all of our information, from groomsmen and bridesmaid bios to how we met and our proposal story. This took the longest, but it was also the most enjoyable part. ;) Somehow it all seemed to come together, and we couldn’t be happier with the final product!
Side note: Shawn has since started designing wedding websites professionally, so if you’re interested in working with him, just shoot me an email at KellySLarkin@gmail.com. :)