Digital invitation: Halloween time and address mistakes

Ten in the morning, still in pyjamas, and there's a witch on the doorstep. She read '9' on your Halloween invitation and came for the party. That is the most common of all Halloween time and address mistakes, and it costs you a coffee and twenty minutes of explaining. A digital invitation from the catalogue lets you write the hour, the street and the door code once, properly, and send it today — no printing, no envelopes, no second message to the group chat.

Three of these mistakes cause almost all the doorbell ringing: an hour with no 'at night', 'my house' standing where a street should be, and a door code that never made it onto the invitation. Fix them before you send and the night starts on time, with everyone in the right building.

The hour with no 'at night' is a trap

Nine o'clock happens twice a day. Write '21:00' or '9 pm' and the guest reading it on the bus at 8:40 in the morning stops guessing. If dinner is at 8:30, say 8:30, then add when the door opens — 'doors at 8:15' — so a dozen people in costume aren't stacked in the stairwell while you light the candles. The neighbours will notice, and it won't be the good kind of Halloween notice.

• Write '21:00' or '9 pm', never a bare '9'. Somebody will read it as morning.
• Put the day beside the hour: 'Saturday 31 October, 9 pm' survives being forwarded five times.
• Say when the door opens. 'Doors at 8:15' stops twelve ghosts ringing at once.
• If children are coming, write the pick-up time: 'pick-up at 11 pm' is clearer than 'late'.

Halloween address mistakes: 'my house' is not an address

'My house' works for the four friends who have been there before and the one who drives. For everyone else it turns your invitation into a group chat: 'where exactly?', 'which entrance?', 'the one with the fig tree?'. Write street, number, floor and town: '8 Luna Street, flat 3B, Madrid'. If the building hides behind a tree, add something people can actually see: 'green door next to the bakery'.

A country house, a farm or a cabin needs the road and the postcode more than the name: 'Olive Grove Estate, plot 12, Torrelodones'. Same for a flat with two entrances: say which one, and say where to park. Two lines about parking and a working bell save more phone calls than anything else you can write.

A clear invitation is not the one with the most words. It's the one where nobody has to text you to find the house.

How to create a digital invitation: time, address, door code

Most digital invitations get messy for the same reason: everything sits in one paragraph and the postcode ends up glued to the time. Use separate fields instead — hour, place, note. In a digital invitation from Send The Joy you can change the hour, the street or the door code after sending, and the link stays the same; guests open the corrected version and nobody gets a second message. Confirmations arrive inside the invitation in one list, so you know how many pumpkins to carve and how much punch to make. It costs 29.99 EUR, one payment, and your guests install nothing. Pick a design, put your own words and photos in it, and send it tonight.