I have been having a lot of ideas for my final project, but I have finally settled on one topic.  In the beginning of the semester, I created a wedding website to share with family and friends.  I created it as a subdomain off of the websites we created for this class.  I figured that since I am already paying for that website, I might as well just make more subdomains.  I set up the website to look nice and go with the fall theme for my October wedding.  Mostly, I wanted the website to be a place where people could get directions, hotel and wedding day information.  I “finished” the wedding website a week ago and sent out save the date cards with the url on there.

Now, I want to make the website even better for my final project and not be “finished”, and of course blog about how I am doing everything.  There is a lot more that I want to do that I just didn’t have time to do before.  I plan on making some big changes to the website and blogging about the process so everyone can know how to do similar things.  It will be a logical progression that as it gets closer to the wedding, information will need to be more detailed since we have so many guests coming from very far away.  Also, this project works because it will continue after the semester.  I like that I now have the ability to create my own website rather than using the already created templates that wedding magazines/websites often give people.

Here is my wish list for the website in the final 2 months of the semester (This list will definitely grow or shrink as needed):

-Right now, the audio player plays automatically when you go to the site.  I thought this was a cute idea to play a song we both liked, but actually it is just ANNOYING.  I now cannot stand the song because I have to hear it so much, and I am guessing that wedding guests might feel the same way.  I am going to make it not play automatically, but instead you have to hit a play button.  Also, I want to go back and blog the process of how I got the audio player up and running because I took the long way and went through C-Panel uploads to do this (it was rather confusing, but worked).

-For our stories, I want to record Enrique and I telling about our lives rather than just writing.  Also, I want to get pictures from when we were younger and do some sort of slideshow/video to show our life stories.

-Under the engagement section, I want Enrique to write his own story about our engagement.  Basically, I wrote the story that is there now and you can definitely tell it is my perspective.  I would love for him to write his perspective so you can see how we were both feeling on that day.

-I need to link to local hotels.  Also, I saw that there is a plugin where it lists local hotels in the widget area.  I want to play around with this.

-I would like to set up a mapquest type thing on my directions page.  I want people to be able to put there address directly into my page and get maps/directions.  They can do this on the Bello Giorno website, but I want them to do it through my page.

-Adding more pictures and making that part look cleaner.  I used a plugin from Flickr, but I want to have a nicer photo display.

-Contact us page should be an actual contact sheet.  I don’t want people to have to e-mail us, but instead they can just enter contact information directly on the website.

-I want to videotape Enrique and I cooking Bolivian food in the kitchen one day.  It is usually an interesting process with the two of us cooking.  He is pretty good at it and we are constantly running around the kitchen.  After video taping, I want to speed it up and make some sort of video with this.  I’m not clear on what this will be yet, but it is just an idea.

-Continue to play around with various wedding plugins like RSVP, password page protection and love quotes.

If anyone has other ideas, let me know.