This must be the first website I’ve made in, ooooooh, 9 years. The fact that, for much of those 9 years I’ve been what one might term a “web professional” is a mere footnote to the collosal historical document that is the joeandgemma.co.uk website.

A couple of things to note as you click through my magnum opus, scoffing at the laughable simplicity, inadvertantly dropping crumbs from your mid-morning croissant on the collars of your Paul Smith shirt:

The plan was for me to throw something together with Google Pagemaker as a template such that I could hand it off to the singularly talented Dave to, you know, actually make nice.

Having completed the template in an hour (yay!) I noticed that, against the run of experience, there were at least two templates available from Google that didn’t utterly suck balls. The plan then was to let Dave enjoy his holidays and simply transfer my sucky templates into the new, exciting, clean, Googley ones. This was to have been as simple as clicking a mouse button. No such fucking luck. It took a further two hours to get to the equivalent point in my new precious snowflake of a site.

Having decided that this wasn’t just a template site, I suddenly became very precious about it all: Should it be “Getting there” or “Map”? Should there be a sub-nav? Should I load the map into an iframe? Suddenly I’m struck with an uncomfortable realisation that, christ! wedding websites are like so totally 1999. What the fuck am I thinking? Why not just go the whole hog and stick a midi of Here Comes The Bride on there?

Having come through that long dark night of the soul, I reverted to type: If this is going to be a wedding website then, god dammit, I’m going balls-out. Below is a list of rejected ideas:

1) Twitter integration for the big day. “im gettin married. OMG!”

2) Pre register all 180 guests on Dopplr so that lift sharing and coach journeys can be coordinated. (And, honestly, part of me still weeps that my family simply aren’t NOW enough to see this through. Every time I bring it up its like I’ve suggested throwing rocks at their childrens heads. Bastards.)

3) A simple rails app that will allow female guests to upload descriptions of their outfits (based around some elegant schema that Mullany and Evans would have helped create) to avoid disasters on the day. (And, yes, this is a big problem and yes, I do think it’s half of a good idea.)

4) XML feeds of the wedding list, updated hourly through the week, every 5 minutes through the weekend. Why? I’ve got absolutely no fucking idea, although I’ve half an idea that Dan could squonk it into a GPS and produce some tasty Flickr visualisations that show me how mean my friends are based on their goegraphical locations. Or something.

In the end though, I just kept it real, kept it street level, kept it GEN-YOO-INE for the kids.

And, when I found out that Google don’t* do DNS support, I’m not ashamed to say that I cried a little.

*And won’t, if you can believe that.