I got engaged in July 2019 and wedding planning got started right away. We got really excited about all the possibilities ahead of us and started asking around for major pain-points from people who had recently planned a wedding. I wanted to get out in front of any potential problems so that we could make our wedding planning as smooth as possible. The one that kept popping up over and over was the RSVP process. It was hard to keep track of all the mail that was being sent and remembering to mark it on the master list. I got really excited because that meant I could probably develop a web-based solution!
One of the major hurdles we had to decide was how to get guests to visit the website in the first place. Because there are a lot of expectations around weddings, we still decided we needed to send out traditional invitations in the mail. Not all of our guests will be computer savvy so we needed to keep that persona in mind as well. We settled on giving guests the option to mail back the RSVP card in the invitation or visit our website to RSVP, hypothesizing that most people would opt into going online. I also found it important to give them a simple url instead of the urls that the free sites were providing. The would increase the likelihood of guests remembering the url without having to look it up. It also is just much easier to type. We settled on www.skylar-and-john.com
Now we just needed a website to send the guests to. I began to scour the internet for solutions (this is not a new problem, why reinvent the wheel?). There are plenty out there, and plenty that are free to use even. Considering I like to save money, I began to run with one: The Knot. The Knot is an incredible tool and it is improving all the time. They have an RSVP tool built right in to it, you can link all of your registries to it and you can even set up a honeymoon fund if anyone wants to donate! I did not see a need for developing my own solution any more, as it met our needs. The only issue was that people I showed it to were having a hard time locating how to RSVP. This was an issue for me as it was the entire reason I started this process. With The Knot's solution, I was unable to customize elements to my liking and had to stick to their format.
Ultimately I decided that it was prudent to put the RSVP button front and center to increase engagement with that button. Fortunately, I did not have to come up with a new solution for managing the RSVP list, I could just directly link to The Knot's interface and bypass their website solution for us. It has made RSVPing so much easier for our guests and made me so much happier in the process! I got to develop a site that looks amazing and it accomplishes the goal better than the solution we had in place.
I wanted to use this opportunity to build a website as a way to learn a new skill. I used the online website builder Webflow, which has allowed me to become familiar with a simpler way to build a website than having to have extensive HTML and CSS knowledge. But unbeknownst to me, Webflow sets up their GUI in a way that teaches you how to set up a CSS file. I have learned more about CSS by trying to avoid it than I ever thought possible!