Megha Biswas, a 24-year-old software engineer, for instance, wanted to do “something different ” for her marriage to college sweetheart and techie Sharad Kumar Singh on February 11. She googled and stumbled upon www.ourwedding.in, a portal that offered to create free, customised wedding websites. A few days after she contacted the portal, giving details of the colours and layout, meghasharad.ourwedding.in was up on the Web, with a Flash introduction and a schmaltzy tagline that read, “Blending two Hearts: Megha and Sharad”. Anyone who has an access key, a provision to ensure privacy, can enter the site, which is like a Wikipedia of their courtship and big day. The Webpages take you through the whole rigmarole — how the guy proposed to the girl, their family albums and funny snippets — besides listing the wedding venue in Kanpur, a map giving directions to reach the place. Outstation guests can even find out where they will be put up and what are the “local attractions”

Says Megha: “When you tell someone you are getting married, you invite a chain of questions about your fiancé, his education, how we first met, his family and so on. This site answers all that at a click.”

Certain wedding websites don’t become redundant even when the big day is over. Chartered accountants Hersh and Minouti Jani, who tied the knot on December 4, are still active on their site, www.firstphera.com/mywedding. They’ve uploaded photographs of their honeymoon in Phuket with a Bollywood song in the background. “Ten years down the line, we can look at this site as a repository of our memorable moments with the comments in the guest book and the videos,” says Hersh. Raakesh Menon, a 30-year-old product manager who got married on December 28, now plans to start a blog on his wedsite. His first post will be: “How was my wedding?”

The companies operating the sites are evidently happy with the trend. Natesh Babu, CEO of Techweb Technologies, a Bangalore-based firm that operates www.ourwedding.in, says they have created sites for 200-odd couples since its launch in October and receive an average of 10 enquiries a day. Virtual Lifestyle, an Ahmedabad-based firm that runs www.firstphera.com has created 2,000 sites since the portal, went public in November. Though both portals are offering free service at the moment, www.firstphera.com is planning a paid version soon, costing between Rs 600 and Rs 1,500, the latter for a one-year membership, a free domain name and uploading of unlimited photos. It is also planning what it calls a “wedbook”, a paper version of your site for Rs 1,000. Techweb Technologies, meanwhile, plans to earn their revenue from advertising.

Mydreamshaadi.com, a portal that operates out of Kolkata, is a tad expensive though. It charges anything between Rs 10,000 and Rs 1 lakh. For Rs 10,000, you can have a two-page site and 50 snaps, while for Rs 1 lakh, you can go for live Webcasting, a mailing list with five newsletters and 10 CDs of the website.