Online wedding invitations

As the wedding draws closer, I'd like to share some comments on one aspect of wedding planning: the invitations.

We decided to go the cheaper / more environmentally friendly / possibly easier route and do online invitations. We decided to use an online invitation service rather than just sending out an email ourselves, because those services can manage RSVPs and stuff. We figured Facebook invites would be too informal for a wedding. So we tried out a few other invitation services by sending Cathy and myself invitations to a sample event.

The first one we tried was Evite, because I'd heard of it before. This turned out to be the most annoying invitation website that we tried. When we replied to our invitation, it asked us to pick a password. It seemed to want all the guests to sign up for site memberships, but I think there was a small link allowing guests not to get a membership. Maybe there's a way for the event creator to disable this option, but I didn't go searching for it. I find it annoying when I'm pressured to sign up for a website (which is part of the reason this blog is on a service where you don't need a membership to leave comments), and we didn't want to annoy our guests, so Evite was out. They also have advertising on the invitations, which seemed tacky for a wedding invitation. We're trying to keep the wedding fairly simple and inexpensive, but it is still a much more significant event than an ordinary party.

Then we tried Pingg. Their free service is a lot less annoying than Evite. Guests don't get pressured into signing up. And you have the option of paying a small fee to remove the ads from the invitations.

Finally, we tried Sendomatic. They specialize in ad-free invitations, so their free service can only invite 10 guests per event. For their paid service, you have to pay based on the number of people invited. Like Pingg, they don't pressure guests into registering for their site. Overall, I think their invitations look a bit more elegant than Pingg's. On Pingg, you choose a dominant picture for your invitation, or upload your own. On Sendomatic, you choose a background image, and you can also upload an image that will appear over the background, above the text.

We decided to use Sendomatic, but I would not hesitate to recommend Pingg too. Either option is a lot cheaper and probably a lot less work than mailing invitations. And if some people on your invite list don't have email, you could print off a copy and mail it to them.

And now the downside of using a service like this: some email services will put the invitations in the spam folder. Fortunately, these services let you see which invitees have clicked on the link in their email to view the actual invitation. Then you can contact the people who haven't seen the invitation and remind them that there's an invitation in their email somewhere. You can also re-send the invitation (without paying an extra fee) if they already cleared out their spam folder. Contacting these people was probably at least half the work of doing online invitations, but probably still less work than managing the RSVPs from paper invitations.

So overall, I give electronic wedding invitations a thumbs up, but they have their annoying traits.

And as the wedding draws near, I'm counting my blessings. I've found someone who is fun to be with, a great friend and companion, beautiful, and who brings out the best in me. (That's four, but there are plenty more.)