|
All About Wedding Invitation Templates
One of
the features on our website are
wedding invitation templates,
wedding program templates, and other
wedding stationery templates. It has become clear that
there's a lot of 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.
The reason it has become clear that at least some of our visitors
don't understand what the templates are all about and how they are
used come from the questions that we get, and here are some
examples:
What is
the difference between typeset and templates?
How many
invitations can I print?
How much
extra is it if I want to print 300?
What kind
of paper 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, and to answer some of the questions that we
get--so here goes.
The
wedding stationery templates 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 would 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 a homemade invitation! 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
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.
The
second option--the one we offer--is she 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, type in the words, and press 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 find out 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 also
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 a template
order.
Then we
created our web pages, offering our 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, but
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
got 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.
|
