I brought the idea of doing the website myself to Clare for a few reasons. I didn't want to pay for any extra features from other sites like theKnot, I wanted to be able to do a few custom things on the website, and I wanted to work on my skills a bit. It also allowed me to link directly to Venmo and Zelle instead of another third party payment processor that would take a percentage of cash gifts. Originally I wanted to do a whole backend system with RSVP management, but that ended up being too ambitious (and probably costly) for the time that I have. Since this mostly done myself (with some color/font/design input from Clare), any design issues or bugs you may find are mostly my fault as well. Oops.
I did some research on some open source wedding websites and came across this github repo.
After reading the instructions on how to set it up, I went to Google and looked up potential website domains. For $12 a year I now own wadawedding.com. (For all of you other Wadas out there I am open to giving you a subdomain like jordan.wadawedding.com).
So after forking the github repo above here, I did most of the custom changes and fixed a few issues I had.
Github has this feature called Github Pages where it will host static webpages for free and allow you to use a custom domain. You cannot host any backend services on this so to keep track of your RSVPs you need to have another solution.
To do this, the github project I forked used Google Sheets. Google Sheets is basically just Google's online version of Excel. A lesser well known function of Google Sheets is the ability to attach an App Script to the sheet. This allows me to (on a small scale) host a backend service on my Google account for free.
Basically when you submit your RSVP form the data is then automatically inserted into a Google Sheet for me. I then set up columns in that sheet to total up things like meal count and total RSVPS. This also allows me to take manual RSVPs.
Whenever someone submits an RSVP it also send us an email that someone has RSVPd. Still deciding on whether to send out a confirmation to the user as well.
Update: Google Scripts is a real pain to work with as a free service. At least when you're trying to debug. All documentation will say that using console.log or logger.log will work to log data.
This is a lie. None of that works at all when deploying it as a web app. I had to create a log by basically logging the data to a separate sheet on the RSVP Google Sheet.
The total cost for this is $12 a year. Here's a cost break down.
Domain - $12/year. Bought from Google Domains.
Page hosting - Free. Github hosts small static pages for free.
RSVP handling - Free. Google hosts small services for free.
This could have been entirely free. The website domain would just have looked a little less nice like this https://wadawedding.github.io/wedding-website. If you click that link it will just redirect you to wadawedding.com.
Let me know if you have any other technical questions about this. You can text or email me if you have that information, or contact my wedding email at clarejaredwadawedding@gmail.com