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A little bit about how chrislovesfran.com
was created...
by Chris Barth
This site was built entirely in my free time,
during our engagement, with my lovely bride's instruction.
I let her be my client and I designed a custom site to suit
our needs (which, as it turned out, were many). The finished
project fulfilled our goals though it is, even still, a work
in progress. If you have any questions, feel free to contact
me for more information.
This site was created
using:
HARDWARE:
Power Macintosh 8500/G4 450 (no longer the stock configuration)
iMac G4 800 17" Flatscreen
Nikon CoolPix 990 and 2500 digital cameras
various scanners
SOFTWARE:
Dreamweaver 4 and MX
Photoshop 6 and 7
Fireworks 4 and MX
Illustrator 9 and 10
BBEdit 6.5
SimpleText and TextEdit (built in text editors for the Mac)
Vicomsoft FTP Client and Transmit 2 (FTP programs)
various web browsers (for testing)
How to get started
on your own wedding web site...
First, know what you want to communicate. I had a good idea
what Fran was looking for, style and content wise, and she
sent me to some other people's wedding web sites before I started.
That really helped to start a discussion of our likes and dislikes.
We spent some time chatting about it in the car while making
our frequent trips down to the Indianapolis Barth home. Based
on the ideas she and I had, we put together a preliminary site
map. I can't stress enough how important this
step is. Later on, I could always go back to the site outline we drew up for reference. If you want
to make a successful web site, draw it up on paper first. That
will help you whether you build your own or hire a designer
to help.
The next step is to gather all the appropriate
content together: all of your pics, graphics, links, bios,
maps, instructions, etc. Translating everything into the digital
world can be a task, but it's worth it. For images, you'll
want to use JPEG's (.jpg). For graphics, GIF's (.gif). The
links and text can be entered using a simple text editing or
word processing application...just keep it simple (don't use
any formatting or special fonts) and save as a .txt file. It
will make it all go more smoothly later.
Next, you'll need to get some online real
estate. Web hosting can
be done for cheap (even free). It all depends on how you want
your site to appear to your audience and what you want the
site to do. Don't pay more than $20 (max) a month for this
service or you're being taken. You might want to secure a meaningful domain
name (like "chrislovesfran.com" for us). This
can be done for $35 or under (per year) using one of many different
domain name registration services (like Register.com or Dotster.com).
These steps are easy enough to do, even for the technically-challenged,
if you're willing to do a little web research.
Once you're that far, you're ready to get
to work. You'll need computer access,
web site building software,
and a FTP program
to get it up on the web. The possibilities here are almost
endless. Again, do a little research. It's possible that you
already have some software on your machine that can do the
job. You definitely don't need to be an HTML coder to create
nice web sites (although it does help). Finding a WYSIWYG (what
you see is what you get) web design program that is simple
to use is easier than ever before. All that's left then is
to build and upload. Build. Upload. Repeat (hey, I was just
trying to help you get started).
Alternately, you could hire a web designer
to do all of this for you. Hmmmm... Do I know any web designers
I could recommend?
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