A celebration of life, by invitation only.
A public tribute, a private area for family, and RSVPs that count households instead of headcounts. Built for a family that wanted the memories shared and the details kept close.
The brief
A family was planning a celebration of life for a parent: two events, one of them a luau, about forty households invited, six weeks to go. They needed one place to share the tribute, tell people where to be, and count who was coming.
Most memorial sites are open to everyone. This one couldn't be. The events were by invitation, and a public page with a venue and a time on it would have defeated the point.
What we built
A public page that says little
A tribute, a photo, the dates. Search engines are told to skip it, and the address isn't a name anyone would guess.
A private area behind an email check
Guests enter the address their invitation went to. If it's on the list, they see the venue, the times, the full obituary and the photos. If it isn't, they get a plain refusal and a way to email us directly. Every attempt is logged where the family can see it, so nobody has to watch an inbox.
RSVPs by household
Each invited household has a seat cap, so one reply covers a family and nobody brings a plus-four by accident. Guests answer for each event separately, with optional allergy notes for the caterer.
Invitations and reminders
The guest list lived in a spreadsheet, so we built the send step around it. Invitations go out from the site, delivery is tracked, and households that haven't replied get a nudge before the deadline.
A place for memories
Under the slideshow, guests can leave a note for the family. Only signed-in guests can read or write, and any comment can be hidden.
Design that stays quiet
Warm and restrained. The words carry the feeling, so the design stays out of the way.
Decisions worth explaining
Gate the gallery, not just the details
Photos of a person are personal. Keeping them behind the check meant the public page was safe to leave up for a year.
A small stack with a real backend
Cloudflare Pages and a small database. It costs almost nothing to run, and there's no plugin bill.
The result
145 people RSVP'd and attended one of the two events, and about that many came to the luau itself. The family had a site they could send with confidence and a live RSVP count in place of a group text thread, and the caterer had a headcount and allergy notes before the day.
The real site is private, so the demo uses a stand-in name, photo and words. The structure is the real one. Visit the demo
Planning one?
Tell us the date and the size of the guest list. We'll tell you what it takes.