How to make a wedding invitation website guests can use

Those six go where a person reading on a phone between meetings reaches them within two scrolls. Write each one as a label, a value and one short note underneath, and use the note to answer the question that would otherwise arrive as a text at eleven at night. "Parking: in the field by the gate" is a fact. "It is a field. If it has rained in the week, park along the track instead" is the thing they needed.

Two of those notes do more work than the rest: what to wear, and whether children are welcome. Describe the dress by what the ground and the weather will do — grass that heels sink into, an evening that turns cold after ten, whether there is dancing — because the name of a category tells nobody any of that. On children, yes or no is the whole answer, and if it is yes, say who is watching them and until when, because a parent is working out whether one of them drives home early.

Put the address and the reply deadline where a guest reaches them in two scrolls. The photographs, the story and the thanks can sit underneath, where the people who have already decided to come will find them. The practical rows belong in the middle of the page rather than tidied to the bottom.

Three things reliably take space and get skipped: a paragraph explaining how the venue was chosen, a list of thanks to the people supplying the flowers and the food, and a welcome note that says only that you are delighted and cannot wait to see everybody. None of them change what a guest does next. The date is the opposite case. State it once at the top and again beside each event, and stop there, because a third statement of the same date reads as a reason to check which one is right.

The gift line is the one people overwrite most. "Your presence is the only present we need" reads as a formality and gets treated as one, and people bring something anyway. Say it once, plainly, and name the thing you would actually take instead: the photographs on their phones from one particular night, a song each for the music, an hour of help clearing up the next morning. Put that beside your other requests rather than in a section of its own.

Keep the top of the page to one photograph. The album belongs under the timings and the address, and so does the story of how the two of you met. Somebody working out whether they can make the Friday should not have to scroll past the whole album to find out where the place is.

Give each event its own row instead of writing the weekend as a paragraph. Mehendi on Friday evening, haldi on Saturday morning, the ceremony on Saturday at half past five, the reception on Sunday: four rows, each with a place, a start time and one note. A paragraph holding all four is a paragraph somebody reads at speed and arrives at the wrong house on the wrong day.

Say which guests are invited to which events, in plain words, beside the events themselves. If the lists are genuinely different, build a separate link for each group rather than writing conditions into one page and hoping people apply them to themselves. Nobody reads "close family only" and concludes that it means them.

Give times a person can plan a drive around, and name the gaps. "Gates at four, ceremony at half past five, photographs at six, dinner at eight" tells someone with a two-hour drive when to leave, and it tells the guest who hates standing about that the stretch between the photographs and dinner has nothing scheduled in it. Saying that in advance is more use than leaving them to work it out at six o’clock.

Write the last stretch of the drive the way you would say it on the phone: where the pin actually drops, what the wrong stopping point looks like, the landmark to turn at, and the point where the road stops being a road. If the map puts people a kilometre short, at a petrol pump on a highway, say exactly that. It is what they ring to ask.

If there is a bus, give the departure point, the departure time, who is driving it, and the detail people need most and are told least: when the last one goes back. "He waits ten minutes at the gate at half past twelve and then he goes" is a rule guests can plan around. "Transport will be arranged" is not a rule.

Then answer the two questions nobody will put to you directly. Where to park if it has rained in the week, and where to sleep if they cannot face the drive back. Name the guest house, name the distance from the venue, and name the person holding the list of rooms.

The standard version goes: "Aarav and Ishita met in 2019 through mutual friends and have been inseparable ever since." Nothing in that sentence could only be about them, and every guest has read it before with two other names in it.

Write it for the people who were in the room rather than for the two of you. Name the housewarming half of them attended, the bus route you both kept getting on, the flat above the bakery where several of them were fed. Those are the beats a guest can find a place in, and they are the ones that earn the section its space.

Six beats is enough, each with a date and one thing that actually happened, ending at the wedding so the sequence arrives somewhere. Six is also short enough that nobody has to scroll past it to reach the timings.

If someone is missing, say so here rather than leaving it to be handled awkwardly on the day. One short paragraph naming them and one specific thing — that the dal on the table is her recipe and nobody has matched it since — does more than a line about being present in spirit, and it tells guests they are allowed to bring the person up.

One named person, one deadline, one way to reply. "Tell Meera yes or no by the first of March" works because there is a human at the end of it and a date on it. "Kindly RSVP at your earliest convenience" produces a list you will be chasing by phone in the last week.

Ask for everything in the same breath, because every extra round of messages loses somebody. Coming or not, a seat on the bus or not, anything they do not eat. Three answers in one message, so the person collecting them writes one list instead of three.

Give the deadline a reason in something countable. Chairs, plates, seats on a bus. "A maybe is a chair nobody sits in" gets answered, because it turns a vague request into a number that somebody has to order by a particular Tuesday.

Send the link and the sentence in one message: the date, the place, and what you need back. A forwarded image of a card followed by a link in a second message means the link arrives with no context and the card arrives with no address.

Send it to family groups separately rather than as one broadcast to the whole list. A message in a large group has scrolled out of view by the evening, and the people who missed it are the ones you will be phoning in March.

Write the message as though the link shows nothing on its own, because it does: no names, no date, no photograph. The sentence you type above it has to carry the date and the place by itself. Open the link once on your own phone before you send it, and check that it loads. Then send it a second time about ten days before the deadline, with only the deadline in the message and nothing new in it.