Planning a wedding often involves lots of DIY projects — including making a wedding website.

Lots of couples create wedding websites so that guests can easily access important details about the big day that might not fit on a paper invite, like schedules, dress codes, gift registries, and even photo albums.

While there are plenty of drag-and-drop platforms that make it easy for anyone to build wedding websites, you and your partner might not want a cookie-cutter website. Why not use your upcoming nuptials as an opportunity to put your coding knowledge into practice?

If you already have a baseline knowledge of how to build web pages, here are some clever add-ons you can use to customize your wedding website with code.

An easy-to-read schedule

Anyone who knows HTML and CSS, aka the “power couple” of web development, can set up a no-frills static wedding website. With these languages, you can build a table that displays your day-of schedule right on your webpage — and save yourself tons of day-of questions about event timing.

Check out this example wedding website that Jiwon Shin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Codecademy, created. Here’s what the code for the schedule table at the bottom would look like:

	
Schedule
		
		

			
			

				
Time
				
Event
			
			
			

				
4:30 PM
				
Ceremony
			
			

				
6 PM
				
Dinner
			
			

				
10 PM
				
After Party
			
		

Need a refresher on building tables in HTML and CSS? Our course Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and GitHub Pages walks you through how to create HTML tables (you’ll even get hands-on practice making a schedule for a wine festival).

Once you have a handle on HTML and CSS, you can use JavaScript to add responsive and dynamic features to a website, like animations or interactive elements. Our Learn JavaScript course is an excellent entry into the fundamentals of front-end and back-end development.

A photo album

Adding pictures to a webpage is simple with HTML/CSS and a little JavaScript. But if you really want to show off all your engagement and couples photos, consider making a photo album that plays like a slideshow. Take a look at Jiwon’s workspace (you need to create a free Codecademy account to view it) to see how she coded a photo carousel that cycles through four images.

This is just a taste of how you can use JavaScript to level-up websites. Our pro course Building Interactive Websites with JavaScript will teach you how to marry (get it?!) HTML and JavaScript to make websites that users can actually engage with. For example, you’ll get practice building an interactive game and a shopping website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Handlebars.

A custom URL

Give your wedding website a memorable URL (that even your nieces and nephews will be able to type) with our course. It’ll walk you through how to build, deploy, and host your own domain with the domain name registrar NameCheap, and you’ll also learn how to use Bootstrap, a popular CSS framework with a library of pre-written CSS rules.

An embedded registry

Many registry sites like Zola and MyRegistry give users the option to embed a HTML snippet into a custom wedding website so users can browse and shop the registry on-site. Technically, you don’t need to know any code to copy and paste a snippet, but having a grasp of HTML is a good tool to have under your belt and will give you more flexibility to make adjustments if you need.

A countdown

Build anticipation for your event with a countdown timer that expires on the big day. You can create this using JavaScript — but it’s slightly trickier for beginners, because it involves some asynchronous functionality.

Kenny Lin, Domain Manager at Codecademy, shared an example of how you could code a countdown timer. Check out his workspace here, or use the code JavaScript snippet below in your own website:

// Edit the string to get your desired countdown change 'December 31, 2022' to your own date
const desiredDate = new Date('December 31, 2022');

// Get the time to use in a later calculation
const datesTime = desiredDate.getTime();


// Assigning the interval to a variable to clear and reset on a second to second
const countdownInterval = setInterval(function() {

  // Get today's date and time
  const currentTime = new Date().getTime();

  // Find the distance between now and the count down date
  let timeDiff = datesTime - currentTime;

  // Calculating the different units of time
  const days = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24));
  // Remove days' time from timediff
  // Continue this pattern for hours, minutes, and seconds
  timeDiff -= days * 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24;
  const hours = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60 * 60));
  timeDiff -= hours * 1000 * 60 * 60;
  const minutes = Math.floor(timeDiff / (1000 * 60));
  timeDiff -= minutes * 1000 * 60;
  const seconds = Math.floor(timeDiff / 1000);

  // Grab the 'counter' element
  let counter = document.getElementById('counter');
  counter.innerHTML = `${days} Days, ${hours} Hours, ${minutes} Minutes, ${seconds} Seconds`;

  // If the count down is finished, write some text
  if (timeDiff < 0) {
    clearInterval(countdownInterval);
    counter.innerHTML = 'Countdown's up!';
  }
// Every 1000 milliseconds the counter text renews
}, 1000);

An impressive layout

You can turn to our course Create a Professional Website with Velo by Wix to learn how to quickly make an interactive wedding website from expertly designed templates. Velo is Wix’s full-stack development platform. “With Wix, you don't need to worry too much about HTML and CSS, because Velo will take care of that for you,” Jiwon says. And most people complete the course in 20 hours, so it’s not a huge time commitment.

Local weather forecasts

Stressed about the weather for your outdoor or destination wedding? Consider adding up-to-date local weather information to your website using a third-party API. Using the Wix .fetch module, you can add data from Open Weather App, like historical weather, precipitation maps, and hourly forecasts.

Some final tips

As you start to build your wedding website, you’ll want to avoid these common web dev pitfalls that can mess with a website’s functionality and user experience. Another handy wedding-planning skill? Learn how to manage your guest list and RSVPs through our pro skill path Analyze Data with Microsoft Excel. And if you’re really feeling ambitious, you could even build a mobile application for your wedding after making your way through our iOS Developer Career Path.

Building a personalized wedding website is just one example of what you can do with web development. Sharpen your skills with HTML and CSS code challenges or explore the many jobs in the vast field. Codecademy has tons of resources for folks who are interested in jumpstarting a web development career. With our Front-End Engineer Career Path you’ll learn to use JavaScript, React, and Redux to build dynamic websites, and even build projects that you can include in a portfolio.

Web Development Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy

Web Development is the practice of developing websites and web apps that live on the internet. Whether you’re interested in front-end, back-end, or going full-stack, the content in our Web Development domain will help you get there.

Making simple tweaks to be more environmentally conscious in your daily life — like shopping second-hand or unplugging your devices — can often feel like a drop in the bucket when it comes to reversing climate change. And while mitigating the overwhelming effects of climate change will take a lot more than remembering to compost your banana peel, the collective effect of these habits amounts to something.

Even as you write code or develop software, there are steps you can take to be better to the planet, according to Asim Hussain, Microsoft’s green cloud advocacy lead.

Asim focuses on creating sustainability solutions for people who are in the business of building software. “I’m trying to answer the question: What can people do in their jobs — or the things that they’re sitting at their desk eight hours a day doing — to have a more positive impact on the planet?” he says.  

Through lots of research and experience as a developer, Asim came up with a group of guiding principles that developers can use to build green software. With this framework in mind, you can ultimately utilize fewer physical resources and use energy more intelligently to reduce your software’s carbon footprint, he says.

The 8 principles of sustainable software design:

• Carbon: Build applications that are carbon-efficient, meaning they extract as much value as possible for each gram of carbon they emit into the atmosphere.
• Electricity: All software requires electricity, so how can we build products that are energy-efficient?
• Carbon Intensity: Consume electricity with the lowest carbon intensity, which is the amount of carbon by weight emitted per unit of energy consumed.
• Embodied Carbon: Move away from “planned obsolescence” by building applications that are capable of running on older hardware without sacrificing performance.
• Energy Proportionality: Maximize the energy efficiency of hardware by running work on fewer servers with the highest rate of utilization.
• Networking: Reduce the amount of data used and decrease the distance it has to travel across a network.
• Demand Shaping: Building “carbon-aware” applications is a matter of adding eco modes that adjust your computer’s demands to times or regions when the supply of renewable electricity is high.
• Optimization: Keep track of step-by-step optimizations that make your product more carbon-efficient, like cost or performance.

The cool thing about these principles is that they don’t just apply to engineers or people writing code; they’re useful for “anybody who’s even remotely involved in or has any influence in the building or running of software,” Asim says. Of course, the tangible ways that people implement these principles into their daily lives vary depending on their specific role.

For example, a machine learning engineer and a web developer would use different techniques and tweaks to implement the principles. “Machine learning tends to be very CPU-intensive,” Asim explains. “Maybe you’re pushing more to your end-user device? So, if you’ve got a machine learning model, instead of making API calls to a server, what can you do on this device so that you don’t need to do that transfer?”

A web developer or mobile developer, on the other hand, might make specific choices that ensure a product won’t become obsolete as hardware and operating systems get more advanced, Asim suggests. “So, you’re always testing websites on older browsers, and you’re making sure things work on older hardware,” he says. There are even more benefits to this down the line: If software is built to outlast these updates, people will end up wasting less hardware.

How to get involved

These are just a few examples of how sustainable software design can change the way you write code and develop technology. Here are some other ways that you can get involved with the movement:

• Join the ClimateAction.tech Slack community: Connect with thousands of like-minded tech workers who want to address climate issues in the workplace. On Slack, you can ask questions, share resources, or just have meaningful conversations about climate tech.
• Contribute to open-source projects: Asim’s nonprofit, Green Software Foundation, has a handful of sustainability-focused repositories on GitHub that you can contribute to (heads up: you need to become a GSF member before you start making changes to repositories). For example, one of the projects involves figuring out a methodology to calculate the carbon intensity of a software application.
• Share this wisdom with the rest of your team: Don’t discount the impact that one person can have on mitigating the effects of climate change. “If you’re in a dev team, all you need is one person who thinks of climate as a priority, and they’ll change the processes that will change the DevOps pipeline,” Asim says. Host a brown-bag presentation for your colleagues on sustainable software design, or share a link to this blog in your Slack channels.

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