Evite

Evite is an online party planner, taking care of all the little stuff that goes into making a party great and worth remembering for a long time. It provides a whole bunch of creative tools and applications that help people plan all kinds of parties, big or small. This free of cost service helps its users save a considerable amount of time and money that they would otherwise spend on searching professional party planners, hiring them, sending out invites, deciding themes, preparing lists, buying gifts, etc. It allows its users to send out free invites, thank you e cards, maintain address books, upload photos and gives them partying tips and gifting ideas. Evite can be used for planning all kinds of occasions- birthdays, anniversaries, festival parties, special days, bachelorette parties, etc. It has a calendar that shows all upcoming festivals and important days, making sure that one never runs out of reasons to celebrate. The users can also scribble in the blog on the site.

Evite was launched in 1998 and is headquartered in Los Angeles. It is one of the operating businesses of IAC or InterActive Corp. Evite is currently the largest online service for planning social events. It has more than 15 million registered users so far and the numbers are ever increasing. They get around 120 million hits every month and send out approximately 14 million invites. These stats testify Evite’s popularity.

Evite lies somewhere in between. There are some similar services available on the net with minor variations. Though it offers some unique features like drink calculator, self- designed cards and invites, budget estimators etc. Despite of having all such tools and applications it faces stiff competition simply because of its similarity with other identical sites. There are lots of complaints of Evite users because Evite is not improving over the years. The biggest complaint is that invitation emails still don't contain all the info for the event. Users have to go to the website, which is stuffed with ads, to look for all the details.

Evite has a simple look, with a white background and green and black text. Although the advertisements on the home page lend it a colorful look. There is a wide variety of colorful and beautiful e cards and Evites for users to pick from. They have tried to keep the format as simple as possible and users can navigate through pages with ease.

Registration is mandatory to be able to send out invites and e-cards or use any of the free party planning tools and applications. The process is slightly lengthy. It asks for such details as one’s first name, last name, country, postal code, mobile phone number, gender, email address and the password. After registration a verification code has to be entered for account verification. Registered users can send out cards and invites and avail all the services that Evite offers. The users also have the option to merge their two different email accounts.

All Evite’s services come for free. However, it has an advertising based revenue model. It lets advertisers display ads on homepage or in links or put them in emails. It gives detailed information about the ad sizes, pricing and other useful information to the advertisers for placing ads on the website.

Evite lets you plan a party for each and every occasion. But Evite is not the most innovative and easy to use service for this purpose. It has the advantage of being the largest event planning service on the web.

http://www.evite.com/