How do you create a wedding website when your job is to work on websites all day? Yikes. Of course it was my responsibility. I wanted to do something easy. I wanted to do something fast. I wanted to do something that would look good. I work in Drupal every day of my life, so it’s a logical choice, right? I went with WordPress. 🤣
This will get a bit technical, but it was a blast for me to set up, so I want to share some of the details:
Domain Name
First thing we needed was a domain name. You know, google.com, wikipedia.org, etc. It has to be catchy, and it has to be easy to say, spell and remember. DaveAndRebecca or PaginiWedding or DaveRebe2019 were all the basic options. Rebecca suggested Macgini (obviously a mashup of our last names) and although I was reluctant to butcher my flawless Italian last name, it felt like the winner.
In general, I try to pay pennies for domain names. You can buy a year of a .com for somewhere in the $1 range for the first year, and maybe around $15/year going forward. We really only need this name for a year+. We could have went with the MacginiWedding.com domain, but not after I found out there’s a whole “.wedding” TLD (top level domain)!
So now I know I want http://macgini.davidpagini.com, but GoDaddy wants $40/year for that domain! That was a bit steep when I could get the other one for a dollar, and (if you didn’t know this) I’m in the middle of planning for a wedding and need to save every dollar I can. Along came porkbun.com, maybe my favorite domain name ever, with that domain available for ~$20. In addition, I really like their services and will be using them as a first stop to buy domain names going forward.
So now I have a domain…
I was all set to get up and running on Gmail for some wedding email. It turns out, Google changed their policies about 5 years ago and no longer allows for custom domains to use their business tools (Gmail, calendar, drive, etc.), so that was a huge bummer for me. I started looking around, and came across Zoho.com. They let me set up 2 new email inboxes and a distribution list so we can keep all our wedding emails in one location. They even have a mobile app so we can get our email right from our phones, an absolute MUST for Rebecca.
The Website
All of the above is probably the bare minimum I would have done. I could have bought the domain name, and pointed to a Knot customized website, and I’m sure I would have been frustrated by the lack of control, and they would have asked me to pay for something, but overall it would have been good enough.
I can never do something that simple, though; I had to do my own thing. I’ve created tons of websites over the years (some of which still run, circa 2001), so I can say I’m comfortable with it. I like to try new services as well. I have, for the past few years, used Dreamhost to publish websites. I could pay ~$120/year, and publish just about as many hobby sites as I wanted to. I thought about using Github and the “github-pages” feature to host a static website (in fact, that was the first iteration of this domain). But in the spirit of trying something new, I wanted to give Amazon a spin.
I found this incredibly easy to follow guide that resulted in a WordPress site up and running in under an hour. I spent a few days tweaking to my liking, and some time populating with content, such as this article you’re reading now.
So there you have it. A relatively brief retrospective of what it took, from a technology standpoint, to get this site up and running. I was most excited to play around with AWS tooling, and even tried a few things with Amazon Alexa. We’ll see what other fun things I can come up with over the next year of planning for our day.