Were
I to do it again, Deathwing and I would even now be pulled up to a
drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas, exchanging vows before an Elvis
impersonator, while my sister served as our witness, rolling her eyes at us and
our antics, happy for us. But it’s too late, as we’ve already booked the
church, bought a dress, and begun the long argument about which operating
system would best serve us in our new life together.
As
part of our wedding, we opted to put up a wedding website, to allow my friends
to discover what Deathwing’s last name actually is, to allow people to RVSP
electronically, and to provide a link to the handy on-line registry we’re
using.
I
investigated a number of commercial wedding websites, and came to the conclusion
that they’re geared towards the same clientele that comes up with such original
screen names as "BobbysMom," "HotStud," and "SexyChick." That is to say, the
people who really shouldn’t be online, because firing up AOL and using a
digital camera is the extent of their technical abilities. The commercial sites
I visited all offered me "unique" and "personalized" designs, but further
investigation revealed cookie-cutter code, with the only real differences
between hundreds of sites being color scheme and the substitution of sappy
photos for stock photos.
Even worse were the ones that used proprietary
technologies, such as Flash. Don’t get me wrong, I like Flash, and there are
some awesome sites out there that use it almost exclusively, but it shouldn’t
be used if the purpose of the site is to distribute information to your guests.
You can’t use .alt tags with Flash, it’s hard to index, it hogs bandwidth, and
it’s not universally supported. While I may be running a mean machine,
Grandma’s still using a 56k modem and Windows 3.
The
canned sites also don’t offer custom domain names. What you end up with tends
to look something like this: marguerite&deathwing.dreamweddings.love4eva.biz.
Not classy at all. On a corollary note, Geocities is the dumpster of the
Internet in that only garbage ends up there.
I
ended up firing up my own computer and applications, spending an afternoon
creating graphics and style sheets, and registering a domain name with my usual
hosting company. So now our friends can find our website, and use it, without
being bogged down with mind-numbing midi playing "Everything I Do" on endless
loops. I also put in the appropriate tags so the site isn’t searchable, since I
know that no one wants another pointless wedding site cluttering up the search
engines.
Of
course, what I told Deathwing was that I had used a commercial site, opted for
the fuchsia and lavender color scheme, "When You Love a Woman" playing in the
background, and that we were being hosted at Angelfire.
He’ll
forgive me for the scare someday.
Marguerite is a geek extraordinaire who has grown up on HBI, Computers, Gaming, and Science Fiction.
to send her your comments.
