My First Client Project: Building a Wedding Website Under the Stars
This project was my first professional client site, and it didn’t start out as a wedding website at all. My client originally came to me looking for a portfolio site. Partway through our conversations, the plan changed: she wanted a dedicated wedding website instead, one she could link to with QR codes on her wedding invitations. Guests would scan the code and land on a page where they could RSVP and find everything else they needed to know about the big day, all wrapped in her space wedding theme and colors.
She accepted the project on February 4th, and I delivered the finished site on February 9th (five days, start to finish), with the wedding itself set for May 28th at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Challenge: A Gallery That Had to Work as Hard as It Looked
The hardest part of this build was the photo gallery, not because it was technically exotic, but because it had two jobs that kept pulling in different directions: it needed to look genuinely beautiful, and it needed to stay out of the way of the page’s actual purpose, which was getting people to RSVP.
My client gave me creative freedom on this part of the design, which was a nice vote of confidence, but it also meant I didn’t have a fixed target to build toward. I ended up working backward from how I wanted it to look on a big screen, rather than my usual mobile-first approach. I had a clear picture of the desktop version in my head before I’d solved what it should look like on a phone.
Getting the smaller sizes right took real trial and error. I tested across several breakpoints in Chrome DevTools, starting with the iPhone SE size, and went through a few different layout attempts before landing on something that actually worked: a compact gallery that still told a visual story without overwhelming the screen or competing with the RSVP flow.
That same care carried through the rest of the site, too. After the first round, my client only asked for a few small changes, and iteration two was the one she loved. Watching a design get sharper through that kind of back-and-forth, taking a client’s instinct and turning it into something concrete, is one of my favorite parts of this work.
The Quieter Challenge: Setting Up RSVPs the Right Way
The part of this project that doesn’t show up on screen at all was the RSVP form itself, built with Formspree. Rather than routing her form submissions through my own account, I set up a dedicated Formspree account just for her and gave her full access to it, while keeping myself locked out entirely.
That decision cost me a little convenience. I couldn’t just check the dashboard myself to confirm things were working; instead, we tested it together to make sure her submissions were coming through correctly on her end. It meant more coordination than the “easy” version would have. But it also meant her guests’ personal information stayed entirely in her hands, not mine, which felt like the right call for a wedding, of all things.
The Result
By the end, my client had a gallery she was genuinely excited about, an RSVP system she could manage herself with full ownership of her guests’ data, and a section that even linked out to nearby hotel recommendations for out-of-town guests, a small extra I added after realizing how much easier it would make things for her.
Here’s what she had to say afterward:
Chloe was absolutely wonderful to work with and extremely helpful. She was very patient with me and was able to explain things to me in a way I could understand. My soon to be husband and I are thrilled with our wedding website. She fulfilled our every request, including setting up RSVP. She even researched hotels in our area that our guests could book and added beautiful descriptions and language to the site in general. Thank you Chloe, for a website that will match our celestial themes, and for helping us into our Infinity and Beyond!
What This Project Taught Me
This was my first real look at what client work actually feels like: not just the code, but the relationship. I hit a few “new developer” snags along the way, especially getting the backend access setup right, and my client was patient through every one of them. That patience taught me as much as the technical work did: good client relationships absorb the rough edges of a learning curve, and that’s worth remembering on both sides of a project.
