Wedding Websites and Registries

Cover photo by Cara Mannino and Chris Largen.

While wedding websites are not unique or special to Disney Fairy Tale Weddings, nor Disney Cruise Line weddings, I still think they’re important to talk about, because you have to put out even more information than you do for a regular wedding. If your wedding guests book the Hilton hotel that’s twenty minutes away from your venue instead of five, that’s an easy fix with an Uber. If they get the Disney Fantasy instead of the Disney Dream, you have a much bigger problem on your hands. 

Or if your brother thinks the wedding is in September, instead of March, that could be a problem. Yeah, that actually happened. 

I wanted to put as much information as I could on the website, to make planning as easy as possible for everyone. However, the first step to making a wedding website, is to find a website provider. 

I could have completely built our wedding website, utilizing the same program that I use to run Twenty Something in Orlando, but I’m lazy. It was much easier to use websites that provide these professionally. There are three major wedding planning sites I found that provide free wedding websites: The Knot, Wedding Wire, and Zola. Minted also does wedding websites that match their invitations, and while I didn’t use this, a friend of mine planning her wedding at the same time did, and she seemed happy with it. 

I actually did website builds on all three websites, because I wanted to see what I thought would work best for us. I actually wound up using two different ones, one for the cruise, and one for the Boardwalk Celebration. 

Wedding Wire: I started with Wedding Wire, and I think they have the best planning interface by far. It’s extremely user friendly, and gives you a lot of flexibility. You can add multiple events with different guest lists, track RSVPs, design seating charts, and more. They offer a planning checklist that’s printable, and a budget tracker with a pie chart. They also have forums where you can talk to other brides for support and feedback, and they offer lists upon lists of recommended vendors, but I never used them. There are tons of articles to help you plan and research. On the website builder, they provide lots of cool pages beyond the standard– such as wedding party and accommodations, quizzes, surveys, and videos. You can also set a custom color as the background instead of being stuck with whatever the template gives you, so that’s kind of neat. The main drawback I found was the limitations in adding custom pages to your wedding website. You get a tiny little text box and you can’t break it up with subheadings. I could have made it work, but I went looking at other options. Another strike against Wedding Wire is that you can only add retail registries. I couldn’t find a way to add a place for people to give money as opposed to a physical gift if they wanted to. 

The Knot: The Knot provides many of the same things as Wedding Wire. They don’t seem to have as many planning articles, and they don’t have the forums. They do have recommended vendors, a guest list manager, checklists, budgets, and a wedding day timeline feature. They don’t have the seating chart planner, and I find their interface a little more cumbersome. However, their wedding website system is MUCH more flexible. You do have to choose from their preset templates for the style of the website, but I was able to make my own accommodations page, instead of using the preset one that had cruise, parking, and hotel information. I was also able to make my own itinerary page with each day broken down into multiple subheadings, plus an FAQ page with packing lists, excursion information, and more. Their registry interface is better also. You can add retail registries, plus they have a cash fund option. Even better, they do charity donations with every purchase! “For each qualified gift purchased off your registry on The Knot, we’ll donate up to 3% to the charity of your choice at no extra cost to you, or your guests.” I picked the World Wildlife Fund out of the options, because, yay animals. 

Zola: Zola is primarily designed for wedding websites and their registry service. The wedding planning is a bit of an afterthought, so they have the least amount to offer for their planning interface. There’s a guest list manager, and a checklist, and that’s about it. Their checklist is SUPER in depth though, and it’s printable, so that’s awesome. What they lack in planning, they more than make up for in their website and registry. You can only choose from preset templates for the look of the website, and you can’t add anything beyond the standard pages. The good news is that their standard pages are pretty awesome. They already have an FAQ page for you to use, and a “Things to Do” in addition to “Travel”, so it’s more versatile than just accommodations. Rather than “Events”, it’s “Schedule”, so you can break things down into more detail if you need to. Zola has their own extensive catalog of wedding gifts to choose from, but you can also add other retail registries as well. You can add cash gifts, and things from websites that have no wedding registries. 

The most popular thing I have ever posted on Twitter was a joke about adding a LEGO set to my wedding registry.  

Well for some silly reason, I couldn’t find a wedding registry option on the LEGO Store’s website, but Zola let me add it to my registry anyway. Rather than sending people to the LEGO Store’s website to buy it and figure out shipping, they can just give the amount of money so I can buy it myself. I was also able to make it a group gift since I don’t expect anyone to actually spend $329 on a wedding present. I also added a ton of things from ShopDisney for my Mickey Mouse themed kitchen. 

Another cool thing with Zola is that you can post a link to your registry separate from your website. I was able to list the Zola registry on Twenty Something in Orlando months before I had the website for the Boardwalk Celebration done. They’re also on Ebates/Rakuten!

Zola also has a referral program! If I refer you, we both get $50! So if you’re working on your wedding website, hit me up!

Best Planning Interface: Wedding Wire 

Best Website: The Knot 

Best Registry Service: Zola 

I’m actually using all three of these. I’m using Wedding Wire’s planning tools, mixed with my planner and bullet journal, to keep everything on track. The cruise website and registry are set up through the Knot, and the Boardwalk Celebration is set up through Zola. Originally, we were registered at Target and Amazon in addition to Zola, but Target’s interface is weird and things kept going out of stock, so I moved everything to Amazon and Zola. 

All three of these wedding website services are free, but there are paid upgrades available. You can buy a custom domain name so you can send people to www.ChelseaAndJay.com (no that link doesn’t work) instead of https://www.weddingwire.us/website/foundmyguy, which is the link that works. I got around this by using my blog. I just routed www.TwentySomethingInOrlando.com/ZolaOrTheKnotHere  to their respective links. Obviously, most people don’t have that trick up their sleeves, unless they’re a blogger. 

There is something else important to talk about with wedding websites, whether you’re having a Disney Cruise Line wedding, another cruise line wedding, a Disney Fairy Tale Wedding, or a backyard wedding. You will spend hours writing this website. You will be so proud of your cute little wedding story that you wrote. You will annoy one of your friends into proofing it for you, to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Then no one will read it. Just prepare yourself mentally for that. People will still get things wrong, ignore your instructions, and ask questions that you have already answered. Brace yourself, because your friends will mean well, but there will be a day one of them will ask a question, and you will have to resist the urge to strangle them. 

This is where I will mention once again that my brother thought the wedding was in September instead of March. I wish I was kidding. 

Out of pocket expenses so far:  

Cruise Fare: $4,944.06
Invitations and Postage: $89 

Total: $5033.06