Pros & Cons
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- Terrific ease of use.
- Highly customizable invitations.
- Tons of themes.
- Mobile QuickVite invitations and mobile RSVPs.
- Guests can suggest dates and sign up for potluck items and carpools.
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- A bit heavy on ads and commercial tie-ins.
Evite Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Linux |
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Business |
| Type: | Personal |
Anything that can simplify the hectic process of party planning at all is welcome, and Evite definitely does, making the party life easier for both hosts and guests. Evite has long been the dominant player in Web invitations. The numbers speak for themselves: 15 million invitations to more than 450,000 events each month, according to the company's reps. The site has been around the longest, too—nearly ten years. Impressive rivals have entered the fray, though, especially MyPunchbowl.com. But Evite isn't resting on its laurels. It's continually honing the site and adding features, like the just-launched QuickVite mobile invitations feature.
You can start designing an invitation even before registering, but you need an account to send invitations. After you start the registration process by entering your name, ZIP code, mobile phone number, sex, e-mail address, and password, you'll receive an e-mail (at the address you submitted) with a confirmation link. Your account keeps track of parties you're throwing and those you've been invited to. Getting started is a simple matter of hitting the big green "Create an Invitation" button.
After that, you'll find over 600 themes divided into 45 categories such as holidays, sports events, book clubs, and baby showers. Within categories, the themes can get pretty specific. Sending invites for a lesbian tree-trimming party? You're covered. If, however, your theme still manages to land outside any of those offered, you can design your own invitation style from scratch. When you go this route, you can choose from 36 backgrounds or upload your own. After that, you can select from over 100 main and accent images—Evite will suggest ones that go with your background. Lastly, you choose colors for text, boxes, and header bars. Once you've completed that, you arrive at the same form you would have if you'd selected a prebuilt theme. If you started with a canned theme, you can still go back and make customizations. I built invitations both ways, first using a holiday template, and then choosing everything manually, and in each case I created a passable invite in less than 5 minutes.
After I chose the Christmas Globes theme, a form asked for the event title, location, and time. It also let me type in a message of up to 3,000 characters. Clicking in the message area brings up formatting options for the font—type, size, bold, italics, and underline—as well as for paragraph alignment. You can also upload your own new main image and select a bunch of options that let you, for example, ask guests to bring something (like a potluck dish), create a URL for the event, let guests suggest dates, poll invitees, and make your get-together a recurring event. For my test invite, I included potluck items, guest input for the date, and a poll, and the features worked as advertised.
When you ask people to bring potluck dishes, you set a quantity for each item and, as people sign up to bring them, the number decreases.
Among the several commercial tie-ins is Evite's "Add Hotel Info" option. This will let guests use Hotels.com within the Evite invitation to find and book accommodations. There's also a "Find gift recommendations" link, which displays content from gifts.com within the Evite site. Ads in Evite are based on the invite text—one event I called "Not A Golf Outing" was accompanied by an ad with Tiger Woods's picture, for example. It's hard to blame Evite for getting that one wrong, however.—
Choosing the A-List
Once you've determined all your options, you can save the invite as a draft, preview it, or start adding guests. You can preview the host invitation Web page, the guest invitation page, and the invitation e-mail. You can also print out the invitation details or even send them to your mobile phone.
Evite simplifies the process not only of designing invitations, but of actually issuing them: You can, of course, enter addresses in a text box, but you can also import them from AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!. You can keep an address book in Evite itself, too, for repeat shindigs. When you've got all the addresses entered (don't worry, you can always invite more—or disinvite those who disgraced themselves at the last event) you can, if you want, add a message and choose to be notified of replies before you hit Send Now.
When guests click on a button in the e-mail that Evite generates, they're taken to the Web invitation, where they get a chance to RSVP, and, depending on the options you've chosen, can invite more partygoers, suggest dates, leave comments, and more. Invitations include helpful, automatically added aids for guests, such as a map link and an Evite Carpool—a great feature for those trying to reduce their carbon footprints or who may need designated drivers. MyPunchbowl and Windows Live Events let you put maps right on the invitation, but I'd say the link to the pop-up map makes good sense, and those competing services don't offer the carpooling option.
After the party, guests can post to a message board and upload pictures to share with other partygoers. A nice Java applet quickly found photos on my desktop and offered to upload them to the party site. MyPunchbowl and Windows Live Events go further, adding the ability to share videos. Evite, however, allows attendees to follow proper party etiquette by sending the host a free electronic thank-you note (via another of the site's services, general e-greetings —a natural extension to invitations).
Non-invitation-related Evite offerings include the extensive tips and tools available on the "Entertaining" tab. Here you can find advice about throwing just about any kind of gathering, from baby showers and children's birthdays to bachelor parties. There's a drink calculator, a budget estimator, a party checklist, and a section where users can suggest their party ideas. But a local-event directory for public events that Evite launched in 2004 seems moribund—it turned up no results when I tried it, even though it's still mentioned in the FAQ.—
QuickVite
The newest feature, QuickVite (just launched this month), combines mobile, e-mail, and Web methods of sending and getting RSVPs for spur-of-the-moment get-togethers. There's also a WAP site, where users can view Evite events and manage QuickVite invitations. The service required me to verify my cell phone number by using a QuickVite confirmation code sent to the phone number I gave when I registered. After that, I was allowed to add friends' mobile numbers, which I could import from Web e-mail accounts, and create contact groups.
When creating a QuickVite, you're constrained—even beyond the obvious lack of picturesque invitation themes—in ways you aren't with a Web Evite. The party description for a QuickVite is limited to a title, host name, date, time, location, and message. Most of the invite options disappear, too: You can't ask guests to help pick the date or bring potluck items. Also, entry fields have stricter limits: For example, you get only 50 characters for your message to guests.
A Web preview lets you see how the message will look on a cell phone. Invitees first receive a text message asking whether they agree to receive messages from Evite. Strangely, after I sent a test invitation to a small group of people, I could see their responses immediately on the Web site, but I got no messages on my phone, even though my mobile number was confirmed with Evite.
QuickVite lets you invite a group of contacts via SMS all in one step, which is convenient, but if the gathering is really small and informal, I think it's just as easy to call. Still, the QuickVite feature adds a useful capability the other services don't, and the company claims that nearly a million invitations have been sent to mobile phones using the earlier "Send to Phone" feature, so apparently there is a demand for this kind of service.—
The Party's Not Over
Evite still dominates the online invitations game, though MyPunchbowl is nipping at its heels with a somewhat more modern interface, a VIP designation for required attendees, and a choice between save-the-date and full invitations. Windows Live Events benefits from integration with other Windows Live services, including Hotmail, Soapbox videos, and Spaces personal pages. And both throw less advertising at you than Evite does. But Evite still remains the most full-featured and mature of the group, offering far more invitation themes and party-planning tools. That, coupled with its interesting mobile capabilities—including the newly launched QuickVite—earns it our Editors' Choice for invitation sites, by a nose.
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Final Thoughts
Evite
Though it's getting some stiff competition from the newer invitation sites MyPunchbowl and Windows Live Events, Evite remains the most mature and full-featured way to get guests to show up at your doorstep. It offers the most invitation templates and party-planning tools, and its new QuickVite feature extends it to mobile devices.