evite rules my life

My life is totally driven by evite.

It's a sad story...in the beginning, I tried to resist. As a rule I hate HTML mail, so when I first got evites, I'd just reply and ask the organizer to give me details. As you can imagine, people were lazy and didn't respond, and I was forced to cut and paste the URL into a browser. For awhile after that, I resisted signing up with evite, but finally I figured out that if I created an account, I wouldn't have to cut and paste at all; I could just login to my evite account and all my evites would be displayed on one page. Three years later, I organize any event for more than 5 people with evite, compulsively check replies when I organize an event, use my evite page as a calendar, and am hopelessly lost when evite is down. What am I doing today after work, you ask? I'll have to check with evite. On average I have between 5 and 10 evites in my upcoming events calendar, and a draft or two ready to go.

The thing is, the features that evite offers are really too tempting to resist. My top five favorites:

- seeing when someone has viewed my evite
- offering multiple scheduling options that guests can vote for
- specifying a list of options for things that guests should bring
- privacy options, especially being able to choose if your guests can invite more people, and if so how many
- automatic reminders (somehow i feel less bitchy when i use evite to nag people)

Wow, I sound like an ad for evite, don't I? My biggest criticisms are:

- the UI is just awful...who came up with this color scheme? and lots of preferences are hidden way too deeply
- the site requires cookies to function at all
- there should definitely be a way to say, "copy this evite" and then be able to make small changes (good for recurring events)
- of course, the nasty blinking ads
- the archives only go back about six months, as far as i can tell

I wish that someone would come up with a site that worked like evite but actually had a decent UI.