Planning a wedding often involves lots of DIY projects — including making a wedding website.
Lots of couples create wedding websites so that guests can easily access important details about the big day that might not fit on a paper invite, like schedules, dress codes, gift registries, and even photo albums.
While there are plenty of drag-and-drop platforms that make it easy for anyone to build wedding websites, you and your partner might not want a cookie-cutter website. Why not use your upcoming nuptials as an opportunity to put your coding knowledge into practice?
If you already have a baseline knowledge of how to build web pages, here are some clever add-ons you can use to customize your wedding website with code.
An easy-to-read schedule
Anyone who knows HTML and CSS, aka the “power couple” of web development, can set up a no-frills static wedding website. With these languages, you can build a table that displays your day-of schedule right on your webpage — and save yourself tons of day-of questions about event timing.
Check out this example wedding website that Jiwon Shin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Codecademy, created. Here’s what the code for the schedule table at the bottom would look like:
<div id="schedule">
<h2>Schedule</h2>
<!-- Table for schedule -->
<table>
<!-- Header row -->
<tr>
<th>Time</th>
<th>Event</th>
</tr>
<!-- Other rows for different events -->
<tr>
<td>4:30 PM</td>
<td>Ceremony</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>6 PM</td>
<td>Dinner</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10 PM</td>
<td>After Party</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>Need a refresher on building tables in HTML and CSS? Our course Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and GitHub Pages walks you through how to create HTML tables (you’ll even get hands-on practice making a schedule for a wine festival).
Once you have a handle on HTML and CSS, you can use JavaScript to add responsive and dynamic features to a website, like animations or interactive elements. Our Learn JavaScript course is an excellent entry into the fundamentals of front-end and back-end development.
A photo album
Adding pictures to a webpage is simple with HTML/CSS and a little JavaScript. But if you really want to show off all your engagement and couples photos, consider making a photo album that plays like a slideshow. Take a look at Jiwon’s workspace (you need to create a free Codecademy account to view it) to see how she coded a photo carousel that cycles through four images.
This is just a taste of how you can use JavaScript to level-up websites. Our pro course Building Interactive Websites with JavaScript will teach you how to marry (get it?!) HTML and JavaScript to make websites that users can actually engage with. For example, you’ll get practice building an interactive game and a shopping website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Handlebars.
A custom URL
Give your wedding website a memorable URL (that even your nieces and nephews will be able to type) with our course. It’ll walk you through how to build, deploy, and host your own domain with the domain name registrar NameCheap, and you’ll also learn how to use Bootstrap, a popular CSS framework with a library of pre-written CSS rules.
An embedded registry
Many registry sites like Zola and MyRegistry give users the option to embed a HTML snippet into a custom wedding website so users can browse and shop the registry on-site. Technically, you don’t need to know any code to copy and paste a snippet, but having a grasp of HTML is a good tool to have under your belt and will give you more flexibility to make adjustments if you need.
A countdown
Build anticipation for your event with a countdown timer that expires on the big day. You can create this using JavaScript — but it’s slightly trickier for beginners, because it involves some asynchronous functionality.
Kenny Lin, Domain Manager at Codecademy, shared an example of how you could code a countdown timer. Check out his workspace here, or use the code JavaScript snippet below in your own website:
// Edit the string to get your desired countdown change 'December 31, 2022' to your own date
const desiredDate = new Date('December 31, 2022');
// Get the time to use in a later calculation
const datesTime = desiredDate.getTime();
// Assigning the interval to a variable to clear and reset on a second to second
const countdownInterval = setInterval(function() {
// Get today's date and time
const currentTime = new Date().getTime();
// Find the distance between now and the count down date
let timeDiff = datesTime - currentTime;
// Calculating the different units of time
const days = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24));
// Remove days' time from timediff
// Continue this pattern for hours, minutes, and seconds
timeDiff -= days * 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24;
const hours = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60 * 60));
timeDiff -= hours * 1000 * 60 * 60;
const minutes = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60));
timeDiff -= minutes * 1000 * 60;
const seconds = Math.floor(timeDiff / 1000);
// Grab the 'counter' element
let counter = document.getElementById('counter');
counter.innerHTML = `${days} Days, ${hours} Hours, ${minutes} Minutes, ${seconds} Seconds`;
// If the count down is finished, write some text
if (timeDiff < 0) {
clearInterval(countdownInterval);
counter.innerHTML = 'Countdown's up!';
}
// Every 1000 milliseconds the counter text renews
}, 1000);An impressive layout
You can turn to our course Create a Professional Website with Velo by Wix to learn how to quickly make an interactive wedding website from expertly designed templates. Velo is Wix’s full-stack development platform. “With Wix, you don’t need to worry too much about HTML and CSS, because Velo will take care of that for you,” Jiwon says. And most people complete the course in 20 hours, so it’s not a huge time commitment.
Local weather forecasts
Stressed about the weather for your outdoor or destination wedding? Consider adding up-to-date local weather information to your website using a third-party API. Using the Wix .fetch module, you can add data from Open Weather App, like historical weather, precipitation maps, and hourly forecasts.
Some final tips
As you start to build your wedding website, you’ll want to avoid these common web dev pitfalls that can mess with a website’s functionality and user experience. Another handy wedding-planning skill? Learn how to manage your guest list and RSVPs through our pro skill path Analyze Data with Microsoft Excel. And if you’re really feeling ambitious, you could even build a mobile application for your wedding after making your way through our iOS Developer Career Path.
Building a personalized wedding website is just one example of what you can do with web development. Sharpen your skills with HTML and CSS code challenges or explore the many jobs in the vast field. Codecademy has tons of resources for folks who are interested in jumpstarting a web development career. With our Front-End Engineer Career Path you’ll learn to use JavaScript, React, and Redux to build dynamic websites, and even build projects that you can include in a portfolio.
