For them
Make a website for your wife
A website for your wife is not a birthday card with more pixels. It is an archive that grows: the timeline of the years, the counter since the wedding, the photos from before the kids and after, the video the kids recorded when she was out, and the letter you meant to write at the tenth anniversary and did not.
The Front Page format suits a marriage: a newspaper with your surname as the masthead, her photo on A1, and every year as a column story. Build it once, add a block each anniversary, and keep the same link. It becomes the thing she opens when she needs reminding, and the thing you both open at twenty-five.
Build it as an archive, not a card
Start with the timeline block and be generous: the meeting, the proposal, the wedding, the first flat, the first child, the move, the year that nearly broke you and the one that put you back together. Ten to fifteen entries, each with a date, a photo, and one sentence written in your voice about what that year was really like. This is not something she needs finished in one sitting, and it should not be. Publish it with the first eight entries and add one every anniversary from the edit link; the link she has never changes. In ten years the page is a record neither of you would have kept otherwise, and the effort of one evening a year is what it cost.
Front Page: the family newspaper
In the Front Page format the header becomes the masthead, so it takes your surname: 'The Kowalski Herald', 'The Daily Us'. The subtitle is the headline of this year. The gallery becomes the photo spread, the timeline becomes a series of dated reports, and the reasons list becomes a column. Because newspaper layout expects text, this format is the one where longer captions and a longer letter look right rather than heavy, which suits a page with years in it. The Classic format is the alternative if she would prefer a quiet scroll with the letter first, and the Receipt format works as a joke section if you want one: 'Years of putting up with me: 12, no refunds'. Give the paper a date and a price on the masthead; 'priceless' is the obvious one and it still works.
Two counters, and the moon
The counter block takes any date, so use two: one since the day you met and one since the wedding. The gap between them is its own story. The moon phase block draws the moon on the night you met, or on the wedding night, and the songs block holds the first dance with a line about how badly you rehearsed it. These are small blocks that take one field each and together they say the thing a card cannot: you remember the details, and the details are the marriage. If you married on a full moon, or nearly, the block will say so, and that is the kind of detail that ends up framed. Put the three blocks together in a row after the header, before the timeline, so the page opens with the numbers and then explains them.
The kids' video, and the letter you owe her
If you have children, the video block is theirs. Twenty seconds of them saying what they love about her, filmed while she was out, will be the block she opens most. Put it after the timeline. Then the sealed letter, which is where you write the thing you have been meaning to say for a decade: not the summary of the marriage, which the timeline handled, but what this year was like and what you noticed about her in it. Two hundred words. The letter block seals it so it has to be tapped, and that small act separates it from the rest of the page. Record the kids more than once; the first take is stiff and the third is the one. Keep the letter to yourself until it is published; reading it out loud beforehand spends it.
Privacy, the QR code, and keeping it up
A page with children on it should have a password; set one at publish and she enters it once per device. Pages are unlisted and hidden from search engines regardless. For an anniversary gift, print the page's QR code inside a card so there is something physical to open at dinner, and set the scheduled unlock so the page opens at midnight even though the card is in her hand at eight. The page never expires and there is no renewal fee; the edit link works for as long as it exists, which is how the timeline gets its next entry. If she loses the link, your dashboard has it, and if you lose the edit link, the login page emails a new one to the address you paid with.
Questions
Related pages
Start with the Anniversary template
A pre-filled page in the Front Page format. Change anything, add your photos, preview for free.
Start with this template