Digital invitation mistakes to avoid before you send

It's eleven at night and you're about to send the link. The design says 8:00 pm. In the message you're typing next to it, your thumbs write 7:30, because that's what you agreed with the restaurant on Tuesday. Nobody catches it until a guest turns up an hour early, in a jacket, at a locked door. A digital invitation from the collection can be set up and sent today, so the only thing left to get right is the information inside it.

Most of the digital invitation mistakes we see aren't design problems. The layout is fine. What fails is the data: a time with two versions, a surname without its accent, a link that arrives as a screenshot. All of it is fixable in ten minutes, before the first guest opens anything.

Digital invitation mistakes to avoid: the time with two versions

The classic one. 8:00 pm on the invitation and 7:30 in the WhatsApp message that carries the link. Two sources for the same fact, two versions, and no way for a guest to know which one wins. Write the time once, in the invitation, and let the message do a single job: hand over the link.

• Spell the month out. 05/09 is 5 September in the UK and 9 May in the US. "Saturday 5 September" only has one reading.
• Read the time out loud and compare it with the venue booking or the caterer's contract. If your number and the paper the supplier signed don't match, the mistake is already in.
• Take the time out of the message. If a guest has a question, the invitation is the answer.
• Put the city under the venue name. A time without a place means nothing to someone booking a train.

Names, screenshots and group chats

A missing accent on the cover is the first thing people notice, because their own name is the first thing they look for. Copy names from the message the guest sent you, not from your phone contacts, where they've been shortened for years. And "The García Family" leaves out the partner, the godmother and the friend coming on her own. If you can't name everyone, say plainly who is invited.

Then there's the sending. A screenshot isn't an invitation: the guest sees a photo, can't confirm, and messages you to ask whether they're in. Open the link on a real phone on mobile data before you send it — a button that slides off the screen only shows up that way. And skip the group of forty, where the link is buried within three hours. One message per household works better.

A digital invitation isn't finished when you send it. It's finished when the last guest reads the right time, the right address and their own name spelled correctly.

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

Things move. The restaurant changes ten days out, the dress code gets decided late, the phrase on the cover no longer fits because the party changed tone. If your invitation was a PDF or an image, everyone is holding an old version and you're the one explaining it, message by message. A digital invitation is a page of its own: edit it after sending and the link stays the same, so nobody has to reopen anything they weren't going to reopen anyway.

In the editor, each piece of information has its own field — label, names, date, phrase, place — with a character counter and a preview that updates as you type. You see the name and the time where the guest will read them, before publishing. Confirmations land in a list inside the invitation, and you set the RSVP questions yourself. No app to install, nothing to reprint.

Before you send, do what your most particular guest would do: open the link on your phone, check the time, the date with the month spelled out and the exact address, then read the names out loud one by one. Try a design free, edit the cover, and pay the 29.99 EUR once when the hour and the names are right.