April 20 - Evite.com, the online invite website is in dire need of a comprehensive overhaul. The online site with more than 15 million users claims to be a tool for hosting and attending the better party. Planning tools include directions, carpooling options, ecards, invitation flair, budget calculators, uncounted themed planning pages, recipes and more. Though Evite has added features over the years since its 1998 inception, the site needs a forceful push to achieve more modern functionality. (Google, take note: just buy Evite and integrate it into Gmail. That would do wonders.)
The biggest fault with Evite is the potential it either refuses to bring to fruition or a completely uncreative engineering staff that cannot see outside the current design box. Some of the following suggestions are in place already. Evite either needs to step it up to advertise their availabilty or implement new ideas. Here are a few things Evite should do to move beyond the 1998-style design and functionality:
1. Lose the obtrusive ads and make the invitation the focus of the page: Depending heavily on multiple banner ads with many moving parts is a thing of the past. Product placement integration into the online invitations would do wonders in making the evite be the object of attention, rather than everything else on the site.
2. Integrate “Yes” responses with users’ calendars & join 21st-century technology: When a person responds in the affirmative to an invitation, the site should prompt users if they want to update any and all calendar programs on their computer – Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, etc. People who constantly sync PDA’s with these programs want to know when their work AND social events are. Evite is in the perfect situation to make this happen, but for some reason this potential is wasting away by not affirmatively asking people to sync their calendars.
3. Put a comment board on the actual invitation: Many times, people want to add more than the comment they provided when responding “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.” Often times, users want to respond to subsequent responses or comments. Allow for follow-up dialog among the invitees. Obviously, for more formal occasions, the host can limit or remove comments or this function altogether to prohibit possible abuses.
4. Send and email requesting pictures to all attendees, not just the host: After parties, attendees have pictures splattered over many photo-hosting websites – Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc. Evite should send an email to all people who attended the parties (not just the host) and make it very easy for other members to view, share, order, and print photographs. This does not just mean having photo sharing as an available feature, but making actual use of it. The current photo sharing option consists of only photos from Shutterfly and is so hidden, many users hardly know it exists.
Get them any way the website can. Offer free printouts for the first person to upload, offer raffles for most pictures of the party, prizes for “best picture” as voted by attendees. If people become more involved in sharing memories, all of the photos are in one location and people can return to the online invitation as their “hub” for social events.
5. Convince users to remain attached to the site via follow-ups: How would Evite do this? First, it could send follow-up emails to users asking questions like, “How was this party?” “Was it easy to get to?” “Comment on your favorite thing about the party.” People get the evite and have very little reasons to return after the party is over. Surely people will use the service to know when the party is, but evite has an untapped market of people to find out how the party was. A great party’s recap is always priceless; greater consistent traffic for a website is even better.
6. Allow for the user to be creative: As of late, creating a “personal” Evite really consists of choosing one picture, font colors, and customizing the “Yes/No/Maybe” boxes. Create different templates that can allow for more pictures, different fonts, and customized text boxes. As the site stands, the creativity options are too constrictive.
Evite does find strength in not requiring users to register with the site if they only want to respond to the invitation. Many people do not want to jump through the extra hoops of signing up. Additionally, the reminders and party-wide messages from the host help keep people up to date before the big event. In short, their strengths are apparent, just not prevalent.
Despite the number of improvements needed, which could be fixed within a matter of days, Evite remains the only option for online invitations. Perhaps the market for a more modern and intuitive online invitation system does not exist. In any case, Evite is in desperate need of an overhaul if it has any intentions to remain the leader of the pack.
As previously mentioned, here is an easier solution: Have Google buy Evite and integrate it into their email and calendar programs. Every time Google buys a program or software, it seems to improve for the better.
Spread the Word: 
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April 20, 2008 at 10:29 pm |
Dude, there are features on evite which do most of this. Emails are sent to the host asking for photos. It allows you to integrate it with Microsoft Outlook. Maybe it should send the photo emails to all yes guests, and allow it to integrate with google calendar, but it does, to some extent, do some of these features already.
April 20, 2008 at 10:31 pm |
I agree very much with the restrictions on creativity.
Further, just a note: you actually, CAN sync it with your iCal (it’s an option on the right hand side of the evite page), but I agree that something should pop up if you reply “yes,” prompting you to do so.
Finally, evite is not even close to the only option for online invitations. It’s just the only well-known option. See, e.g., mypunchbowl.com, sendomatic.com, sendaninvite.com, crush3r.com, etc.
Although I have not used them, I may in the future, b/c many of them seem to allow for more creativity in design.
April 21, 2008 at 9:39 am |
Yes, Evite could be better… but what’s its incentive? Evite essentially has a monopoly of the online invitation world… I certainly don’t know of any competitors. It serves its function well, and perhaps there is not motivation to become bigger or better. Who knows, maybe its profit is marginal, so there is no financial incentive, either, for development. Of course, if Evite includes features that are not prominently displayed, that’s another issue… one of poor marketing. But I thought we were talking about technology here.
It’s a Monday morning, so I can be a bit groggy… but does Ben’s comment post mention any notion that wasn’t already covered by the original post?