Friday, January 14, 2005
All About Wedding Invitation and Wedding Program Templates
One of the features on our website are wedding invitation templates, wedding program templates, and other wedding stationery templates. It has become clear to us that there's some misunderstanding about what they are and how they are used.
On every one of our pages, we have email links so that people can conveniently ask questions about a certain product or product line. It seems that at least some of our visitors don't understand what the templates are all about and how they are used because of the questions we get, and here are some examples:
What is the difference between typeset and templates?
What's the minimum order?
How many invitations can I print?
How much extra is it if I want to print 300?
What kind of stationery does it come on?
We think a major reason for the difficulty is that a principle of web page construction is that you use as few words as possible, and apparently we haven't hit on the proper few words on those particular pages!
We opened this Blog specifically to provide move in-depth--meaning longer--explanations, which should answer some of the questions that we get--so here goes.
The wedding stationery templates at Thinkwedding.com were developed for people who would like to print their own invitations, programs, RSVP cards, place cards, Save the Date cards, etc. instead of paying a printer to print them. Of course, there is a considerable cost savings in doing your own wedding invitations, but you may be surprised at the number of people who just want something that's different, but they want a professional-looking handmade wedding invitation rather than an invitation that looks homemade! In other words, they want their invitations to express their individuality in a way they can't get if they order their invitations from a printer or engraver, but they don't want to be laughed at because the invitations look homemade.
If a bride wants a do it yourself wedding invitation, she has two basic options. She can spend a lot of time searching the Internet for appropriate clip art that doesn't need a lot of editing and matches her colors, then spend an equal or greater amount of time locating the font she would like to have. She then decides on the blank wedding invitations she is going to use, because she needs the measurements, and spends about two hours or so setting up the Word template so that it fits exactly, printing out the results and adjusting the measurements until it fits, typing in the words (which usually doesn't take much time at all), then finally, printing her invitations or wedding program. There are free templates all over the Internet, but we found that they still require adjustment to fit even the most common sizes of invitations.
With the second option--the one we offer--the bride still has to decide what kind of blank wedding invitation card stock she is going to use, but she can then just purchase an already professionally set up template designed and guaranteed to fit her particular invitation, with professional artwork. She then just types in the words, and presses print--all for $9.99.
After one of the daughters of a staff members ended up spending quite a bit of time on the Internet for about a week hunting down clip art and fonts, researching invitation wordings and the proper forms of addressing, she suggested one day that since we have well over a million pieces of clip art--not just wedding theme art, we have another website as well--it might be worth our while and a considerable service if we spent the time to do that for our brides and offer the results for sale for a nominal fee.
When we looked into it, we found that there are quite a few different measurements for blank wedding invitations; there are single invitations, bifold or booklet-style invitations, royal style invitations, marquise invitations, in addition to translucent, trifold, Z-fold, pursefold, or gatefold invitations, and all of them vary in size. Even RSVP cards, Save the Date cards, wedding programs and place cards can vary in both size and style, and if we were to offer a set of templates, we would have to include them all.
We might be a bunch of old bats here at Thinkwedding.com, but with age comes experience, and two of our staff members had worked for printers creating invitation and program templates in the past, but even so, just getting the templates to fit correctly for all those different sizes took two people about two weeks! By the way, we offer a matching plain template free with each blank wedding invitation or blank wedding stationery order, but no artwork, no fonts, invitation wordings, or proper forms of addressing the envelopes and most importantly--no support.
Once we had developed the templates, we then had to investigate and acquire the fonts that are commonly used for wedding stationery so that we could include them in our package of templates, and when that was done, we decided on what kind of artwork a bride was likely to want, according to theme and color. We also decided to include over 60 different invitation wordings as well as Save the Date, RSVP and wedding program wordings, and all the proper forms of addressing envelopes, right up to the President and the Pope. We then decided to fill the orders via email, which meant that our brides wouldn't have to wait for delivery; particularly during business hours, it usually takes less than an hour to receive the files included in a template order.
Then we created our web pages, offering our wedding invitation templates for sale for a nominal sum; for instance, a set of wedding invitation templates in all the sizes, plus the fonts, the wordings file, and the proper addressing file is $9.99. The purpose, of course, was to save the bride a great deal of time and aggravation in creating her own unique handmade wedding invitations.
Well, we're happy to say that our templates have sold well, but we found that there were people who, for one reason or another--usually time or computer literacy--wanted to just press print, rather than compose the wording themselves. We were also asked if we could place pictures of the couple along with the existing artwork. To meet that need, we started offering our templates already typeset, which, in addition to everything in the template package, includes photograph scanning and placement, as well as complete typesetting, for $12.99.
While a lot of people feel up to doing a simple invitation, particularly when the template has already been created and tested for them, setting up a wedding program, even with a template, can be challenging, because it is usually set up menu style with multiple pages and justification both on the left and right, and can get complicated, and we actually get more requests for typesetting our wedding program templates than we get for invitations.
We also started to get requests for things like matching wedding program templates, CD-ROM templates, Save the Date templates, thank you card templates, wedding menu templates, place card templates, wedding rehearsal templates and guest book sheets, and it wasn't long before the thought occurred to us that our visitors might like to know about it. That is when we created separate web pages with our collections.
We hope that this long explanation has served to clarify things a little, for those of you who are confused by the explanations on our web pages.
