In October I started thinking about organising a dinner to bring Adelaide's .NET developers together. I'd never done something like that before and I wasn't sure about the best way to manage it.
Luckily, I remembered meeting Jonathon Kresner at the Wagga Wagga Code Camp in March. Jon had told me he was developing a website in .NET to organise parties. I decided to send him an email and ask how it was going.
Coincidentally, Jon had reached the final beta testing stages of his website, Preparty.com, and when I explained that I was interested in organising a dinner for .NET developers, he was kind enough to grant me a login if I don't mind assisting with the testing.
Preparty.com basically provides you with everything you need to organise a party of any kind (dinner, music gig, or wedding reception) from beginning to end with a smooth user experience.
You start by finding an appropriate venue by choosing from many popular places already registered on Preparty, or by entering details of your own. You then enter the names and email addresses of all your guests and complete the details of your event such as date and time, theme, and other relevant information.
Preparty then handles the creation and sending of e-Invitations with all the details and even a map of the venue location and follows up with a place to track RSVPs, You can even organise entertainment via Preparty and send SMS reminders to your guests as the event draws near. And when it's all over you can invite guests to upload photos from the event to create a slideshow.
I exercised almost all the features of the Preparty website and only found a couple of usability issues that Jon corrected very quickly. For a website supposedly in beta testing, it was very stable.
Preparty is free to register but charges a very affordable rate to purchase email and sms credits. I know now that the website is out of beta and has been released to the public I'll be looking to Preparty.com to organise all my future events and I recommend you take a look too.