How to building a wedding website: list the need for website content

 One of the most useful tools I have at my disposal when building a new website is a spreadsheet. Yep, you heard me right, a spreadsheet.For every major project, I create a spreadsheet with a complete site inventory. It's actually the site inventory that's useful, the spreadsheet is just where it lives. A site inventory is a list of every major item that will go on the website. What is it? How is it organized in relation to the other content? What does it contain? Is there anything special about this piece of content? Etc., etc.

All this info goes into a spreadsheet. That way, you can keep track of each item, make sure it's organized properly, and as content is created, each item can be checked off as "done", "waiting", "draft", "not started", or something else. What you see here, on the screen, is a typical inventory for a site like the one we're building. You can see, I've listed out the core assets of the site, which is the site title, and also the tagline, which I want to change, depending on whether people visit the site before the wedding, or after the wedding.

I also have the public pages, this would be the homepage, our story, engagement photos, and eventually wedding photos. The registry, guestbook, contact, and so on. Then I have the private pages, the guest info, hotel info, and most importantly, the RSVP section. You'll notice that in my site inventory, I don't have any blog posts, and that's an important component of this particular project. The site I'm building right now doesn't have any blog posts because it's just a site about a wedding.

That's not to say a wedding site shouldn't have a blog, in many cases you can use a blog. As we set this up, you'll see you can easily add blog posts to your site and get people to visit that blog. But, for the scope of this particular project, I'm gonna leave the blog out of it, and then at the very end, you'll see how I would use the blog later on, after the wedding. In addition to tracking content, the inventory will also help you create an information architecture for your site, and identify content models. This will come in handy when you start a practical build of the site, because you now have a list of exactly what you need, and where everything goes.

Once the inventory is complete, go through each item and build it, and all the associated content, so everything is ready to go when you start publishing the site. I have all my content in documents and folders, and before you continue, so should you.