Digital invitation: 4 Halloween hallway mistakes

The first group is due at eight. By twenty past, four people in bedsheet ghosts are on the stairs arguing about whether they're group two, and the one with the carved pumpkin is shouting up the stairwell to ask which building this is. Most of the mistakes in a Halloween digital invitation for a neighbours' haunted hallway night happen before anyone hangs a cobweb: the entry time isn't written down, the door has no number on it, and the person with the answers has her phone face down on the sofa.

None of that is a decoration problem. It's a writing problem, and a digital invitation fixes it. You choose a design from the collection, add your own text and photos, and send the link the same afternoon. Here's what goes wrong in most Halloween digital invitations, and how to write it down once.

The haunted hallway starts with a written entry slot

A haunted hallway works in groups, and groups need times. If the route takes ten minutes and you let people in every twenty, say so: 20:00, 20:20, 20:40, until you close. If those times only exist on a sheet of paper taped beside the doorbells, the man from the third floor who turns up at 20:35 will spend half an hour on the landing explaining that he was told eight o'clock.

• One entry slot per group, with the exact time, and a last slot you close on purpose: 23:00, say, so nobody rings your bell at midnight with a pumpkin.
• The meeting point with a number. "The front door of number 14, next to the mailboxes" beats "at Marta's" every time.
• A landmark you can see in the dark: the carved pumpkin by the intercom, the cobwebs on the arch, the orange lantern on the first landing.
• One photo of the entrance inside the invitation, so people who don't live in the building stop ringing to ask "is this it?"

The door, the number and one phone that answers

In a neighbours' haunted hallway, nobody knows which flat belongs to whom. Write the address the way a stranger needs it: street, number, which door, what's next to it. Then add a phone number for the night itself, with a name and the hours it works. "Ana answers from 19:30" is useful. "Call Ana" at eleven, when Ana is in a dark corridor making ghost noises, isn't.

Move the rest out of the group chat, too. That's where times, routes and meeting points go to die under forty messages about who has the dry ice. If the plan lives in two places, one of them will be wrong by Friday.

If the entry time, the door and the phone number live in three different places, one of them is out of date by the night itself.

How to create a Halloween digital invitation that survives a change of plan

It rains on the Saturday, or the first group is twice the size you expected and the whole route shifts twenty minutes later. With paper that's forty new copies and someone walking round the mailboxes in the rain. A Halloween digital invitation is a web page for your event, not a PDF: you send one link, a QR code or a message, guests open it in a browser with nothing to install, and if you change the time or the note at six in the evening, the link stays the same and everyone sees the new version. Confirmations arrive in one list inside the invitation, with RSVP questions you write yourself, so you're not counting maybe-reactions in a chat at eleven at night.

You can add up to six photos (the entrance, last year's pumpkin, the drawing your daughter made for the door) and pick which one is the cover. It costs 29,99 EUR, paid once, no subscription. Try the cover free, and buying unlocks every scene.

Before you hang the first cobweb, get the entry slot, the door and the phone number written in one place. Build the invitation this afternoon, send the link tonight, and let the hallway run itself.