Andddd… we’re back! We’re so delighted to kick off 2018 with a brand new APW. (Byeeeee 2017. 👋 👋👋 Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.) This project took a little over a year, and it included total rebranding and rebuilding the site from scratch. Though if you count all the false starts, it took nearer to two years. And even after all that, I feel a little bit like I did at our housewarming party… everyone was so delighted with our new house, and all I could think about was that all the art wasn’t on the walls yet. (Perfectionist? Guilty.) Which means that while the new site is here (thank God, cue tears, drinking, confetti, more tears), we have tons of small changes that we’ll be making over the coming months. But thanks to tireless work, we finally have a whole suite of publishing tools that we’re only starting to figure out how to use.
Whatever, translation, this is us right now:
But in the meantime, let me point out some of my favorite things. There is our new logo, which we spent endless hours on with our designer, Star St.Germain, and I love it so much we plan to never change it again. Let’s look at a whole bunch of pretty versions of it, because I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS DAY:
I’m also in love with our new, big, and shiny menus. As part of relaunching we did a ton of work re-dividing content, so you can hopefully find exactly what you’re looking for with the click of a button. (Our Advice and Love & Marriage sections are a particular delight.)
We also created a bunch of pages on all of those wedding and marriage planning topics you might want to know more about, and they are pretty and about to get way prettier. One of my favorite new pages is the About page, if you want to check it out.
And though it launched a little earlier than the full site, we’re super proud of our rebuilt vendor directory. We now offer free listings, so send over all your favorite wedding vendors. (And if you’re a vendor and don’t have a listing yet, by all means get on that! We have free listings and beautiful deluxe listings, depending on what you’re looking for.)
In the meantime, please poke around the site. Tell us what you love and want more of, tell us if you spot bugs or if there are fixes you’d suggest. Many of them we already know—for example, our sidebar is way too big, and it will be fixed in the next day or so. But we’re happy to add any issues you see to the list!
And no project of this scope would be complete without heartfelt thank yous to the many, many folks that made this happen. HUGE thanks go to our development agency WebDev, who took on migration and rebuilding of a site that has been publishing for nearly ten years, and handled a content migration that turned out to be so much more complex than we’d hoped. Our whole team has so much love and respect for their absolute professionalism that when we found out it was our project manager’s last day, I completely lost my shit and sobbed. (You cannot overvalue the importance of kind, thoughtful, deeply professional, dedicated people.) We also have to send love and endless sparkles to our amazing designer Star. She is gifted and whip smart, and she has made every meeting a delight. And beyond that I cannot thank my own team enough. Maddie, who has envisioned this new site with me for years, Najva, who tirelessly dedicated a year to making it happen, and everyone else who offered suggestions and just generally put up with us while we struggled through it.
And finally, a huge thank you to all of you. For reading, for commenting, for putting up with a design we didn’t like but were stuck with for a year, and for everything you do to make our work possible. Doing this for ten years has been one of the great joys of my life, and I have each and every one of you to thank for it.
