With modern technology, a wedding website is now the information hub of everything related to your wedding. When you use a wedding website builder, you can list out wedding event details, send out online wedding invitations, collect RSVPs, add a wedding registry and more. In fact, a lot of modern brides have stopped sending out printed invitations and gone completely digital with only online wedding invitations. When I first put out a survey on Instagram Stories asking my community to help me suggest their best wedding website makers, some of the wedding website ideas that came my way included The Knot (probably the best known site), Zola, With Joy, Wix Weddings, Riley & Grey, or the Minted wedding website builder.
For me, the Minted wedding website builder caught my eye because I thought it had the most modern, clean
Using a Minted wedding website even gave me a $50USD credit towards buying stationery, which I used to print out a small
So far so good. I was very happy with the high quality invitations I received. The next step for us was to compile and upload our wedding invitation list – which is the core purpose of any wedding website — and that’s where our challenges began. Turns out, navigating your Minted wedding website is not as straightforward or user-friendly as it seems.
Why is the ‘Edit Minted Wedding Website” option so hard to find?
First of all, I thought it was strange that the Minted wedding website dashboard
Once you find this link a few times, you know where to look for your Minted wedding website dashboard. However, this should have been a sign for me that maybe wedding websites is not the main business service of Minted.
The Minted website has been broken for days
Second of all, their website (although not my wedding website) has been broken for me on my Safari website browser, for days. I thought it was just a temporary glitch, but it’s been about a week and it’s still not fixed. I’ve switched browsers and am now using Chrome instead. No big deal, hopefully this gets fixed soon.
The Minted wedding website cannot group together multiple RSVPs within the same household
Now, here’s our main challenge with the Minted website. I thought creating RSVPs would be as simple as typing in or uploading our invitation list, both of which you can do through Minted. That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The complication I encountered came from not being able to group together multiple people within the same household.
When your guests RSVP, there is a mandatory drop-down menu that makes your guest select their party size. For example, if I type in “Vanessa” as an RSVP, I can select from a dropdown menu with the maximum number of guests in my party. If I select “2” guests, the Minted wedding website does not automatically take into account my partner “Steve” as my guest. On the website backend, it would show up as “Name: Vanessa, Party size: 2”. My +1 “Steve” would not show up as a separate line item. This will cause complications later on when we are trying to have an exact guestlist for table charts and/or name place cards.
Alternatively, if I select “1” guest, then it potentially looks like my +1 “Steve” is not invited. Vanessa and Steve would both have to RSVP individually, and know to select “Party Size: 1” in the dropdown.
How to address multiple guests in the same household
Sooo, after I spent hours fiddling around with my Minted website (yes, tears were shed), I finally got my finace Steve to help because I could not decide how to handle this on my own. What we finally decided on, was to group together multiple names of the same household as a single guest. So instead of: Guest 1: Vanessa, Guest 2: Steve, it would be: “Guest 1: Vanessa & Steve”.
What about meal selections in the RSVP?
When your guests RSVP, Minted has a feature where you can “Ask Questions for Guests”, and have them provide a written text response. This would be the obvious choice for something like meal selection. I encountered two challenges here:
a) There’s no dropdown menu for responses
A lack of the option to provide a dropdown menu, means you will get inconsistent formatting for responses. The question we would like to ask is: “What is your meal selection? Beef (Sirloin) or Vegetarian (Chickpea Panisse). If you don’t have a dropdown menu option, you will be subject to inconsistent formatting in written responses.
For example, someone might type ‘beef’. Someone might type ‘sirloin’. Someone might type ‘vegetarian’. Someone might type ‘chickpea’. Rather than a simple round-up of responses (ie. 100 beef, 20 vegetarian) which you can easily send to your venue or catering company, you will now have to manually review each response written.
Oh how I wish you could turn these survey questions into a dropdown menu for consistency!! In my ideal user experience, the question would be “Beef or Vegetarian” and the guest could select one option or the other.
b) You can’t easily associate a meal selection with a specific person
The second challenge comes again from the fact that you can’t combine multiple RSVPs from the same household. Not only would someone have to type in their meal response, they now have to type in their name and their guest name, and correspond with their preferred meal choice. (ie. Vanessa – vegetarian, Steve – beef). Otherwise, you won’t know which meal is associated with who.
Would I recommend using Minted for your wedding website?
Without ever having planned a wedding, it’s not easy to think through every little detail of the wedding website user experience. So, you go with the opinions of people who’ve used the website before and hope for the best. You can only pick a well-known or popular website, and hope the brides before you have done the research for you. If so many people have used this website, it must be good…or good enough?
Overall, I do love the website design options on Minted. Their aesthetics are great, and so is the quality of their stationery! But if you decide to use Minted for your wedding website, know that you cannot group together multiple members of your household and use the workaround I suggested above to address those concerns. There are definitely workarounds to its flaws, which will result in some manual edits in your guestlist spreadsheet.
One Response
The Minted RSVP issues with multiple guests in the same household and indicating individual meal selections is what ultimately made me decide to abandon Minted for my wedding website and switch to Zola, which makes both tasks a breeze. Guests in the same household can see and RSVP for each other and you can create a drop down menu for the meal selection. It took me awhile to find a wedding website with these functions, but I was thrilled when I did.