Digital invitation for a birthday on a rooftop terrace

You count the chairs on the terrace twice. Twenty-two fit, twenty-five if nobody minds standing. That number is the first thing a digital invitation for a birthday on a terrace should say, and it's the one most people leave out. You can pick a design, write the front page and send the link today from the catalogue: no printer, no chasing answers in the group chat.

The rest is the same kind of detail. When the sun drops behind the building opposite. Where people go if it rains. What time the music stops. Get those three onto one page and the evening plans itself.

The guest list closes before the link opens

Write the real number, not the wishful one. If twenty-two chairs fit, the front page says twenty-two and the plus-one question answers itself. Confirmations land inside the invitation in one ordered list, so you open the link and see who's coming without scrolling back through three days of chat. If the evening has two parts — snacks at 19:00, cake at 21:00 — give each one its own field instead of burying them in a paragraph nobody reads.

• Start and finish times on the front page, not hidden in the middle of a paragraph.
• The real capacity of the terrace: the chairs that fit, not the people you'd like to invite.
• A rain plan with an address and the same hour, written into the venue field.
• One useful dress code line: 'light colours — the terrace faces west until 20:30.'

The hour the sun drops belongs on the invitation

If your terrace faces west, put 19:30 on the front page and let guests decide about a hat, a fan or sunscreen before they leave the house. Write the end time too: in a residential block, neighbours like knowing when the speaker goes quiet.

Change the time two days before and nothing needs resending. The link stays the same, everyone who opens it sees the updated version, and you skip the second round of messages about which plan is the current one.

If a guest has to text you to ask how many people fit, the invitation hasn't finished its job.

What the best digital invitations for a rooftop birthday get right

They're a small website for the event, not a PDF and not an image. Guests open the link in any browser, on a phone, without installing anything, and confirm from the same page. You can add up to six of your own photos — the empty terrace, the chairs, the view at seven — mark one as the cover and swap it later if you change your mind. The RSVP questions are yours to set, so you can ask who's bringing a partner and who's staying for the cake. And when something changes, you edit it. The link stays put.

Pick a design, edit the cover for free and publish once the number of chairs and the sunset hour are settled. A digital invitation costs 29,99 EUR, one payment, no subscription, and you can keep editing it as often as you like without changing the link.