Wedding RSVP Site
Wedding RSVP Site
A whimsical, illustration-led wedding site that walks our friends through a Malay-Muslim celebration.
Why I built it
Off-the-shelf didn't cut it
We looked hard at off-the-shelf tools - WithJoy, The Digital Yes, and Jemputan.me. They looked great on paper, but the deeper we went, the less they fit: photo-heavy, text-dense, and the features we actually wanted sat behind a paywall. We wanted the opposite - something whimsical and illustration-led, made for friends who mostly don't know the rhythms of a Malay-Muslim wedding. When I already pay for Claude Pro, why not just build it ourselves?
How it came together
Three decisions that shaped the site
Three decisions shaped the site, each one balancing whimsy against what our guests actually needed.
Whimsy over walls of text
A lot of these sites are dense with text. We wanted a better balance - illustration-led and light. Friends helped design the section illustrations, echoing our printed invite, so there's continuity from paper to screen.
Written for friends who don't know the customs
Our guests are mostly English-speaking friends who wouldn't know the nuances of a Malay-Muslim wedding. The site explains the two sessions, the cultural moments - gatecrash (hadang), kompang - and exactly when to arrive and when photos happen.
Own the RSVP, not a chat thread
We'd planned to collect RSVPs over WhatsApp or Telegram and track them in a Google Sheet. Building the site gave us far more control - structured questions, cleaner data, and a planned push straight into the wedding masterlist we already run on Sheets.
See it in action
In its final stretch before launch
The wedding site is in its final stretch before launch - tested with friends and being refined with feedback from family. It walks guests through everything they need: the programme for both sessions, how to get there, what to wear, and a RSVP that captures the details that actually help us plan.
Hero
An illustration-led hero echoes the printed invite, accompanied by a song from my fiancee's favourite musician 🤷♂️
What I learnt
What building our own wedding site taught us
A wedding site is an alignment exercise
Building it together surfaced what each of us values and what we want our wedding to say. The nicest part was seeing how aligned we already were on the things that mattered.
The 'wedding' markup is wild
It's mind-blowing that people charge $200+ just to use a wedding RSVP site builder, when you can put together something better and more personal for next to nothing.
Writing for everyone strips it down
Our guests range from close friends to family in Malaysia. Writing for an audience that doesn't share the same context forced every instruction down to its simplest, clearest form.
What's next
On the roadmap
Ship it to our guests
The final stretch: fold in feedback from our parents and family, add the printed invite image to the site, and send the link out alongside the physical invites.
A template for the next couple
My fiancee's brother - getting married in December - was impressed and asked how we built it. His wedding would be a good first test of making the site reusable for other couples.