Purple Trail Online Invitation Review

As my loyal readers already know, I’m a huge fan of ABC’s The Bachelor. Last night I hosted a premiere party. It was so fun and you are going to love the pictures! To tide you over until I can get those I wanted to share a review of the new online invitation service I used.

There has been buzz throughout the blogosphere about the new online invitation service, Purple Trail. I’ve been waiting for a chance to try it out and my Bachelorette Premiere party presented the perfect opportunity.

An avid evite fan, I was hesitant to stray from the familiar. I decided to take a leap of faith on a small party where I knew I could call people if it didn’t work for some reason. Here is my feedback!

Design

The feature I loved best about Purple Trail was the ability to create a custom design. Evite’s system is kind of clunky and I’ve learned it is just best to go with their premade templates. Purple Trail allowed me to upload a picture that I created in Photoshop and customize the background color to match.

Usability

Filling in all of the party information was simple and self-explanatory. The thing I liked best was how quickly the site loads.

Features

A first time user, I decided to try out some of the “Modules” PT offers. First, I found a video preview of The Bachelorette premiere and embedded it on the invite. I also added a poll of my guests to see which condiments they liked on their hot dogs. (This ended up being very helpful when grocery shopping!) I also added the Google Map which I found worked much better than evite’s mapping solution.

Final Review

All in all, I had a positive experience with Purple Trail. In fact, I just received an email asking if I wanted to post pictures from my event or send thank you notes! I did notice slower responses than I normal but most guests ended up responding eventually. I liked that guests could keep their messages private or make them public.

Would I use it again? For the Bachelorette, definitely. But for an event with more people (especially events with guys) I’d be hesitant to stray from what everyone is comfortable with.