Sentinel staff

If you are a Baby Boomer -- commonly defined as someone born between 1946 and 1964 -- or older, you remember how de rigueur wedding rules were. A wedding invitation, like the one below from Emily Post's 1922 book "Etiquette," had to look this way:

Mr. and Mrs. John Huntington Smith
request the honour of your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Mary Katherine
to Mr. James Smartlington
on Tuesday the first of November
at twelve o'clock
at St. John's Church
in the City of New York

However, the Internet has changed just about every other way people communicate, so why not the way people handle their weddings? Wedding Web sites have become common place. Even the new edition of Post's etiquette book has standards for creating wedding sites. Post has a commercial site to market her wedding guide software.

In addition to being invited to a couple's wedding, Web sites provide all kinds of other information about the happy couple. Find out how they met, see pictures of the bride, the groom, their families and pets; learn about their jobs, honeymoon and future plans; get directions to the reception, tips on where to stay and what tourist attractions are nearby; buy gifts; sign a guest book; RSVP for the reception; find out the reception menu; e-mail the bride and groom with congratulations and questions and see the wedding party's dresses and tuxes.

Type in something you want to know about someone's wedding, no matter how intimate, and you will probably find a wedding site out there with that information. Often you'll learn a lot more about the couple than you really wanted to know.

Couples make their wedding sites for somewhat obvious reasons: to invite their friends and relatives to their wedding, to let them meet the person each one is marrying, to make it convenient for them to RSVP, to give directions to the wedding and reception locations, to help them buy presents online, etc.

There are thousands of personal Web sites on the Internet. Plugging in the words "wedding site" on a portal alone results in over a million sites. Three women gave insight for this story about their Web sites. Their sites seem similar to outsiders, but are unique to each couple and have brought a lot of smiles and laugher to their families and their friends. The wedding site concept might seem well, corny, but for these couples making the site has been just one good time.

Their first step in making their Web sites was choosing a server and domain name.

The price for wedding sites isn't high. Like the Stockwells (see part 2) couples can make a site for free from a portal like geocities.yahoo.com/home. The only drawbacks with that type of site are limitations to the number of pages on the site and the URL isn't particularly romantic. It may be something impersonal like www.weddingchannel385762.com.

The first couple in this story, Pauline McCarty, 35, and Jerry Elliott, 34, who will marry on May 19 in Parkville, Missouri, used the Geocity site as the Stockwells did. Their URL is www.geocities.com/paulineandjerry/ourwedding.html

McCarty says this about making their web site, "Jerry and I created the Web site together (I did the coding and we both decided what the content would be). Geocities offers free Web sites to anyone who wants it. We looked into getting our own domain (PaulineandJerry.com was available), but for the short time we wanted the space we couldn't justify spending the money. Creating the site was extremely easy. I'm a mainframe programmer during the day so I just dug right in."

For a romantic touch, and costing between $35 and $75, couples can buy a domain name as the other two couples in this article did from a place called, of course, www.register.com. There, you can buy a name like www.nikiandjim.com, the URL for 28-year-old physical therapists, Nicole L. Holder and James P. Dugan, who will marry on May 12 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or www.kelseymetcalf.com, the name bought by Chandler, Arizona, residents Alene S. Kelsey, 27, and her fiancee, Richard Metcalf, 29, who will wed on April 21. With a domain name, there is a monthly fee for a server, which can be as little as $6.95 a month.

With a server and domain name set, it's time to design a site. The free site includes directions. Creating your own site will require some computer skills. What Holder did was use the pre-formatted pages that came with her server. She says, "I picked the format that I wanted, and played around with it. There were options of pictures and links. I learned some HTML to do the site and when I scanned photos to put into the site, I used the photo editor software."

Kelsey and Metcalf's site is the most complex, but then Metcalf works for Intel in Phoenix and Kelsey is a self-described "Web geek." Their site involves the usual photos and links but adds Java language and applets.

The women told stories about their sites.

Kelsey, a marketer for Valley Public Transportation in Phoenix, says the caricature of the couple on the home page of their site was drawn by an unknown artist in Las Vegas at the New York, New York gambling casino where she and Metcalf had gone for a Valentine's Day weekend.

In a deviation from old time Post etiquette, Kelsey sent out "Save the Date" cards to people being invited to the wedding. The cards were sent out because Kelsey wants an old fashioned wedding and that means formal invitations can't be sent out until six weeks before the wedding. That wouldn't give those attending much time to get hotel and airplane reservations. With the "Save the Date" cards, attendees could have a heads-up for reservations. The cards also have the couple's URL.

Holder said that her site has had 300 or so hits as yet. She added, "It's hard to tell exactly how many hits because my twin sister goes to the site each day and then calls me to complain that there is nothing new on it."

The only problem for the site has been with the guest book, where anyone can go and send a message to Holder and Dugan. Somehow, the guest book became linked to Wicca site. Wicca is a Neo-Pagan nature religion inspired by various pre-Christian western European beliefs. The central deity is a mother goddess, and the religion includes the use of herbal magic and benign witchcraft. (Holder will wed Dugan at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church.) Several Wiccans left unusual messages at Holder and Dugan's site. However, Holder said the Web master took care of the problem.

The Web site is particularly important to Holder and Dugan because their family and friends live all over the world, places like Barbados, London, Jamaica, and Ireland.

Holder says, "At my age, 28, I have started to go to a lot of weddings. In the past three years, I have been to 20 weddings and three had their own Web sites. One site had their own server."

McCarty is probably the most enthusiastic about wedding Web sites. She says, "The Internet has played a major roll in our relationship. We met on it, used it for our sole communication to each other at first and then continued to court each other via e-mail even after we started dating. Now we have created this Web site for our wedding. I bought my wedding gown on eBay. We are currently bidding on our centerpieces on eBay, also.

"My attendants will order their dresses through the Internet, thus avoiding the scheduling of us all getting together and then my having to deliver the dresses when they arrive.

"We found our photographer through the Kansas City wedding site (www.kansascity.com -- then click on Kansas City Weddings). I've also gotten information from several DJ's mailed to my home through Internet inquiries. I've narrowed my cake search down to two using the Internet. I downloaded the pictures to show potential wedding cake suppliers -- even e-mailed the photos to some!

McCarty adds: "Welcome to wedding planning in the new Millennium!"

Continue to Part 2

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