Sam Howat – Entrepreneur and web adventurer.

Designing for yourself is one of the most difficult tasks a designer can take on. Faced with my own wedding in August 2010, I had to sit down and put together a simple site that would allow us to collect RSVP messages, share wedding details and create a landing page for all future communication. Here’s what I came up with…

Goals of the Design

Collect RSVP Information from wedding guests Provide a single location where wedding details can be shared. Share date / time details to guests in a format that can be easily updated. Make the design as easy as possible to use, and cross browser friendly.

Collect guest contact information and save to database. Help avoid manual task of contact management Reduce our hands-on time managing communication.

Interaction & Features

Interaction – I wanted to give the design a little movement and the feeling of interaction, so the entire site will be displayed as a single page, with additional content being displayed with javascript powered “pull-downs” that expand to show the content.

For older browsers, I’ve planned a few stand-by features to ensure that the data is still available even if they’re using an older browser incapable of handing JS / CSS3 Features.

Data – One of the most annoying tasks of wedding planning is collecting contact information for all your guests. It typically is a lengthy process and most people seem to use a old-school address book, writing down contact information by hand. I wanted to create a auto-generated database based on RSVP information that will allow us to send thank you letters to all our guests without having to write 200+ addresses on envelops.

Social Networking – In additional to the website we will be hooking in Facebook connect / like buttons throughout the site that will allow people to RSVP via Facebook and share the event to their friends via Twitter or Facebook.

Don’t Overdo It!

It doesn’t have to be incredibly difficult to make yourself a website. Start with a complete list of information regarding your wedding, and then trim it back to your “must-have” list. Then, build a site that meets the needs of your must-have list, this keeps the site from being too confusing.

Let me know what you think of the design!

Credits: Thanks to Sebastian Nitu for color inspiration on the design.