Next week I will be sharing our Save the Dates with you, and updating you on the screen printing process in our hunt for the elusive white ink! But this week I wanted to share our website that we created to go with our Save the Dates. Since about 80% of our guests are from out of town, we've been getting the when, where, whys (well hopefully not the 'whys') from them for the last few months. So we knew we needed to provide our guests with more information than what we were planning on putting in the actual Save the Dates. Skip to the revelation that we need to launch our wedding website earlier than anticipated. Yay?

Anyways, we decided to do a fun mini-website that didn't take a ton of time to put together, but still gave our guests the important info: date, location, lodging. We picked our domain name, guesswhatilikeyou.com, because this in depth conversation happens frequently in our house:

Me: "Guess what?"

Kyle: "What?"

Me: "I like you."

Kyle: [obligingly laughs and rolls his eyes at me]

We bought our domain name through Name Cheap, and registered our website with Green Geeks (which is a 300% wind powered company!). It cost us $65.40 for the domain name and a year of hosting. Then we designed our simple click-through website in iWeb and voila! Here is what you'll get when you go to our website:

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

We also bought this cute stamp for our Save the Date envelopes, which we will hopefully re-use for the invites, from lovetocreatestamps on Etsy.

The other part of this process was picking a host hotel for our traveling guests. While we suspect many people will rent vacation houses, since they are traveling in groups, we needed something close to our venue that would give our guests who were only staying in town for a day or two an option. We visited 3 boutique hotels that are part of a small, local hotel group called Marin Hotels. Each of these Marin County hotels provide a different experience and price, which we really liked. So since we're using this small group of hotels, and have a group discount for all of them, everyone can pick the price and place that they prefer, and all locations are about a 10 minutes drive away from each other. And since we're staying at one of them, we get the discount for our wedding night, which is an extra bonus!

Did you create a different wedding website to go with your Save the Dates? Or were you just smart, and launched your full website to go with your Save the Dates? Also, how far in advance should we have the full website up and running?