How to make an online wedding card?

Call it the latest technological 'tadka' to big fat Indian weddings — websites as marriage invites. They chronicle a couple's romantic journey, with photo galleries, and provide details like venue, schedule of events, guest list, contact point, travel arrangements, appropriate attire for various ceremonies, gift registries, and more. When Pune-based techie Debojyoti Kar took his 10-year-old courtship with sweetheart Nibedita to the next level, he did it in style. For Debojyoti, a software developer, creating a website was simple. "I always had the idea. You have a number of templates to choose from online. You can also personalize the site."

Vantage points
With friends and family scattered across the globe, it's one of the best ways to create a reference point for guests to seek information about the wedding. It also makes for a good prop for bonding between couples set to take their vows. As Anuradha Ramkrishnan, a housewife who got into this role only a month-and-a-half back, puts it, "When the internet plays such a pivotal role in almost everyone's life, why should a wedding announcement, probably the biggest event of one's life, stay behind?" Anuradha's husband Balakrishnan Subramanian, who works in Kolkata, says, "People are generally used to seeing a wedding invite in the form of a card or an e-mail. But creating a website to invite your loved ones is an innovative way of making your D-day special."

Take your pick
You can improvise on the basic templates. Anuradha says, "Once we registered ourselves with mywedding .com we started working on how our site should look and what the contents should be. We worked to bring together contents like our photos, 'about us' section , background music, the main invitation etc." Adds Debojyoti, "The one I chose provides a free account which would expire after the wedding. There's also an option of purchasing the website for an additional 90 days (which I opted for). You also have the option to maintain it for a longer term, which comes for a higher price."

Depending on your budget, you can have features like a couple's gallery, a blog and a live chat feature for travelling guests to post queries (manned by personnel equipped with the relevant information). Sudeep Ranjan, a faculty member with Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics, Bangalore, says lots of links are available online from where we can download site templates. "But to access these or make changes to them one has to have basic knowledge of the softwares in which they can be edited. Subsequently, one can buy a webspace and get the site hosted or uploaded on the server," he says.

Wedding planner's perspective
Wedding planners too swear by the effectiveness of websites. Chennai-based wedding planner Vidya Gajapati Raj Singh says, "Such sites inform us about the couples' plans. With NRI clients, we meet when we begin to work with them, then the next we see of them would be just a couple of weeks before the wedding. The time leading up to this is when we do all our work and the website becomes a help." Wedding planner Lakshmi Rammohan, owner of Dreamweaver Weddings, Bangalore, says websites score high on the 'go green' front. "Wedding cards are certainly the least 'green' of all practices ," she says. But wedding cards aren't disappearing yet. Lakshmi says, "The essence of a wedding is a keepsake, something that can be preserved for posterity and wedding cards have no rival there. Wedding cards have textures, colours and certain physicality about them that no digital media can quite capture."

Adds Rajesh Bysani, who works with a Bangalore-based internet firm, "Elders still have some reservations. They believe in certain traditional practices and those can't be avoided. Distributing wedding cards is one such practice. Though setting up a website and e-invite did reduce the number of friends I had to give an invitation card to, family and relatives still had to be sent an invite the traditional way." Rajesh had 250 friends logging onto his website on the day, to witness the wedding live. "That was truly an amazing feeling. Friends and family from all over the world were a part of the wedding without being physically present there."

Scoring points
Websites make for a good reference point for friends and family attending a wedding Unlike paper cards, these make for a more interactive forum No scope of postal goof ups. It's all at the click of a mouse A lot more information can be fed into a website, as compared to an invitation card A great tool for wedding planners