Though my love for mini food is well documented (namely, here and here), I don’t think we’ve spent enough time discussing mini desserts. They’re slightly more common than mini food, but these little beauties have a charm all their own. A few of my favorites:

Mini cookies – especially delicious served warm at the end of the night with shots of cold milk. (Photos: Bryan Johnson from Martha Stewart Weddings and Martha Stewart Weddings)

Mini pecan pies – perfect for eating on the go. (Photos: Gladys Gem via Style Me Pretty and Braedon Flynn via Southern Weddings)

Mini milkshakes, complete with striped straws! (Photo by Julie Lim via Southern Weddings)

We talked about donuts at weddings once already, but I still love them. (Photos: Chris Court and Martha Stewart Weddings)

Two creative options: mini ice cream scoops in waffle bowls and cream puffs. (Photos: Martha Stewart Weddings and Julie Lim via Southern Weddings)

We will be having some mini desserts at our wedding, but I’m not going to tell you too many specifics because I want them to be a surprise for our guests! I will tell you that we’re definitely going to be serving mini fruit tarts. They’re John’s favorite, and one of his only requests! (Photos: Jessica Lorren via SW and Martha Stewart Weddings)

(Photos: Stephen Pappas via SMP and Cannelle et Vanille)

Is your mouth watering yet? :)

Hi friends! I thought we might talk about our wedding website today. Not the most exciting topic (at least on the surface!), but I think we did something out of the ordinary, and I’d love to share. As fair warning, this is a pretty long, involved post, so if you’re not interested in making a wedding website for your very own self, you might want to skip this one :)

Photo by Anna Kuperberg; overlay by Em

So how did we get here? We wanted a website that would, first and foremost, be helpful to our guests in preparing for our wedding. Our second hope for it was that it would give our guests a taste of what was to come, and hopefully pique their excitement! To accomplish this, we wanted a site that fit with the feel of the celebration we’re planning, and was highly customizable. Oh yes, and as with most things, I was hoping it would be free, or at least inexpensive.

However, I didn’t really want to make a big production out of it, you know? So I began checking out wedding website companies, fully expecting to choose one for ourselves and call it a day.

Well, we looked at offerings from a variety of companies, including Project Wedding, Wedding Window, My Wedding, Wedding JoJo, and several others. I eventually decided on My Wedding, mostly because I liked that they offered Minted backgrounds.

But as I began to set things up and enter text, I just wasn’t satisfied. The Minted backgrounds were lovely, but the formatting of the text on My Wedding was just… strange, in my opinion. Dissatisfied, I let it sit for a few days.

Meanwhile, this post I had read almost four years ago popped into my mind. In it, Miss Lovebug details the process of turning a Blogger blog into a wedding website. I quickly re-read through her post, and figuring it sounded doable, abandoned ship with My Wedding and set about to create a custom site.

It took me about three hours to hash out the HTML, but I am happy to report that it was totally worth it, AND, even BETTER, that I realized at the end of those three hours a much easier way to make several of the changes. I would love to share the process I used, in case someone else is interested in doing something similar! Here we go!

The overall goal is to make your Blogger blog as un-blog-like as possible. To do this, we must make several changes (which I’ve marked below). (NOTE: Since I am most comfortable with Blogger’s “Layout” template option and Minima template, that’s what I’ve chosen to work in.)

Let’s get started! First, let’s remove that pesky navigation bar. I used the instructions at this link, and they’re simple and easy to follow.

Now let’s remove the date header, comment function, social media links, and “posted by” thing. Click on the “Design” tab, then click on “Page Elements.” Click on the “Edit” link in the “Blog posts” box. Under “Post Page Options,” uncheck every box except “Show Quick Editing.” Also change it to show one post per page for “number of posts on main page.” When you’re done, it should look roughly like this:

Next, let’s get rid of the existing sidebar widgets, and replace them with a single link widget. Click on the “Design” tab. Locate the “Add a Gadget” section, and remove all of the existing gadgets by clicking on them in turn and selecting “remove.” Now, click on the “Add a Gadget” button, and add the “Link List” gadget. I very helpfully titled mine “LINKS.” This will be the main navigation for your guests in the right sidebar. Your screen might look a little like this when you’re done:

Now let’s get rid of the “older post,” “home,” and “newer post” buttons, as well as the “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)” link, that normally appear beneath posts. This link has a great tutorial for removing these elements.

If you haven’t already done so, now would be a great time to start populating your site with some content. Make a new post for every “page” you’d like to have on your site. For example, we have pages titled “About Us,” “The Proposal,” “The Wedding Party,” “Travel Information,” “Gift Registry,” “Get in Touch,” etc. Make sure you make a home or welcome page, too!

Once you’re done with your “posts,” go in and make sure that your welcome post is the most recent post you’ve published. You can do this by clicking on “Edit Posts,” then clicking “Edit” next to your welcome post. Click “Post Options” (near the bottom of the window), then change the date and/or time.

Now, let’s populate the Links widget we created before! To do this, open up the “Edit Posts” tab in one tab, and the “Design” tab in another tab. (So many tabs!) One by one (except for your welcome post), click to “View” each post, then copy and paste the link into your Links widget. You can change the order in which the posts will display in the widget, too.

At this point, hopefully your “blog” should look a little something like this:

Not very interesting, but not very blog-like, either, eh? Progress!

Now’s the fun part, where we’ll add in some pretty details to spiff things up! First, let’s upload a custom header. I made ours in Illustrator (and sized it to 800px wide by 400px tall), but you could use Photoshop, Publisher, or even Powerpoint. Once you’ve got your header saved as a .jpg, click on the “Design” tab, then click on “Edit” in the header box. Upload your header and choose “Instead of title and description” for placement.

You might like to remove the header wrapper like I did. Here’s the link where I learned how to do that.

If you’d like to change the post title text color, click on the “Design” tab, then click on “Template Designer.” Click on “Advanced,” then “Post Title Color,” and choose your desired hue.

Blogger has made it SO easy to add a custom favicon, so there’s almost no excuse for not making one! I just made a little navy blue heart for ours in Illustrator. To upload your favicon, click on the “Design” tab, then “Edit” next to “Favicon.” Make sure to follow Blogger’s instructions in the box.

The final detail I added was to point our site to a custom address, so that it read www.website.com instead of www.website.blogspot.com (much easier to remember, and cleaner for save the dates!). I purchased ours through GoDaddy for $7.67 for one year. The normal price is a little higher than that, but I successfully Googled for a coupon code :) GoDaddy has very thorough instructions on how to incorporate your custom domain into your Blogger blog, so make sure to look for their tutorials after you make your purchase.

WHEW! After you’ve done all that, your site should look a little something like this!

Pretty pretty!

I love so many things about this Blogger “hack,” but the best might be that we can include video – meaning we have a fun way to share our engagement video with our guests!

What do you think? Would you try this for your wedding website? Feel free to email me or leave a comment if you have a question about any of these steps!

I spotted this idea on Southern Weddings and instantly fell in love – bells at the end of the ceremony!

The sound of all your guests ringing little bells as you walk back up the aisle must be so joyful and celebratory! I especially love that in this wedding, the bells have been passed down for generations and used at every family wedding. So special!

Photo by Don Mears. See more here!

Hello friends! Today I would like to talk with you about our videographer. Yes, we are having a videographer at our wedding!! (Two of them, actually!) I am so very excited about this, and I think I am especially excited because videography was something we always knew we wanted, but didn’t always know if it was something we could fit in our budget. I think that the budget realities of weddings are not something that gets discussed often enough, so today I would like to honestly walk you through our path to videography, in the hopes that it could be of help to one of you. Let’s go!

As I said, we knew from the very beginning that we wanted a videographer. We hired an insanely talented wedding photographer almost immediately (yay Tanja!) and know without a doubt that she will capture beautiful and priceless moments from our wedding day. However, because we went over our budget to hire Tanja (which I don’t regret!), we only were able to allocate $1,000 for videography in our initial budget. I knew full well that that was wayyyyy too low, but I chose to cross my fingers and hope that something would work out instead of doing something more productive.

Brad & Deena : wedding highlights from Inkspot Crow Films on Vimeo.

To complicate matters still further, John and I are unfortunately not a fan of any of the videographers we’ve found in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. They’re just not our style, and most are so well established as to be prohibitively expensive, in my opinion.

No, our number one choice for videography was a little duo called Inkspot Crow. MacKenzie and Philip are based near us, in North Carolina, and I was initially introduced to them by my friend Meredith, who just so happens to be MacKenzie’s sister. We were immediately taken with their modern but classic filming style, and their story-driven editing. After working with them on a few projects through work, I also found them to be two of the nicest people around, and a great fit with my and John’s personalities. They are exactly the sort of people you want around on your wedding day.

Tim & Cate : wedding highlights from Inkspot Crow Films on Vimeo.

So I inquired! And as nice as MacKenzie is, even her niceness couldn’t help the fact that their basic package (for filming as well as a highlight and feature-length film) was three times our budgeted amount (you can do the math there). So we sadly parted ways, though MacKenzie did offer to waive their travel fee if we could make everything else work, since they could combine the trip up North with a visit to her Mom. A supremely kind offer to be sure, but still, not much to go on.

Fast forward to last month. I received a completely unexpected and very generous gift, and immediately decided to put it towards video. With that gift plus our initial budgeted amount, we were suddenly 2/3 of the way towards our goal. At that point, we knew we could make it work, so we sat down and took an even harder look at our budget. Extra hors d’oevres? Gone. Custom cocktail napkins? Gone. Less expensive (but still awesome!) band in favor of more expensive band? Yes. Mini cutting cake? Now being made by yours truly instead of our caterer (more about this to come!). With these cuts and more, we were able to shift enough of our resources towards video to make it a reality for us. Thankfully, Inkspot was still available for our date!

Alex & Katherine: wedding highlights from Inkspot Crow Films on Vimeo.

I know that videography isn’t a priority for everyone, and if it’s not for you, then that’s totally fine! But if it is a priority, and you haven’t hired someone because you don’t think you can afford it, I would encourage you to look again. I would make those cuts and more three times over to have a moving record of our day. We have a lifetime to throw parties with awesome details, but only one chance to capture the ones we love the most in action on one of the most special days of our lives. I have never heard a bride say she regrets spending money on videography, but I have heard more couples than I can count say not hiring a videographer is their number one regret. I didn’t want that to be us, and thankfully, it won’t be.

I will leave you with a completely adorable story, and though I might not be getting all of the details right, the sentiment is still true. A family with two little girls lives in the same apartment complex as John’s sister and her fiance. They went over to babysit one night, and the girls begged to watch “their favorite movie,” which they watch at least once a week with rapt attention. Yes, you guessed it: their favorite movie is their parents’ wedding video. I have a hard time thinking of a better reason to hire a videographer than that :)

P.S. Make sure you watch the highlight films from Inkspot interspersed throughout the posts! They’re some of my very favorites.