Moving with Technology – New Wedding Website
I haven’t included non-commercial web design work I’ve done in the past on this site. However as some of the features used by this Wedding Website I developed for some friends may also of use to business, I thought a quick overview would be worthwhile.
The site itself is built on WordPress, which allows allows the site owners to keep everyone up-to-date with latest news and changes, without having to rely on a web developer. It also allows users to interact with the site owners (useful, because its meant for a group of people that know each other) through comments on blog posts. WordPress is an Open Source blogging platform, or as its developers describe it:
…a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
The site also uses a number of web-based services to provide additional information to users, and allow people to interact in different ways. Firstly, because the wedding is in the south of Spain rather than Galway, Google Maps was used to help people find their way from the Airport to the hotel. Google Maps provides tools which allows you to customise their maps in different ways. For this site, we customised the map to give both the location of the airport and hotel, as well as using it to calculate the shortest route and give driving directions and an approximate driving time. More details on using Google Maps for these types of services are available from the Google Maps documentation.
The site uses another Web-based service, Flickr, to share photographs. This allows the site owners, and their friends, to edit, label and store their photos in one place, before they are displayed as part of the Wedding Website. Again, this is possible by using the tools provided by Flickr – further details are available from their services documentation (these services are only for non-commercial use; commercial use must be arranged with Flickr). To create the fancy Photo Gallery used to display pictures once they were taken from Flickr, the very easy to use open source Galleria photo gallery (based on JQuery) was used.
Combining Open Source applications and web-based services, with a web design that made everyone happy, resulted an extremely flexible, and very functional wedding website.
I have the wedding to look forward to now….
