I’m not a fan of party-planning myself, possibly linked to a dream I once had involving Margaret Thatcher and a bowl of car keys, but I feel that a few good Dadgets will see me through anything. Having children means that you’ll end up arranging countless parties, so what are the Dadgets to look out for?

Let’s start with the invitations. Why waste money and rainforests on paper invites when you can plan the whole shindig online for free? There is a wide range of party planning web sites that will allow you to send e-invites to your event and then monitor the RSVPs as they come rolling in electronically.

Evite is possibly the most famous such web site, but their homepage is too busy for my liking and they have a bad reputation for saturating the whole experience with too many advertisements. I liked the look of PurpleTrail as an elegant and feature-packed solution, until I discovered that they don’t allow you to do anything from a Mac web browser – tut, tut, tut.

So my choice of online invite services has to be pingg due to its simple interface and support for all web browsers. Yes, it does have advertisements, but they are not very intrusive, and the way that you can integrate photos, web links and even YouTube videos is pretty cool. I’m currently helping my wife to plan Henry’s Christening and pingg is definitely my tool of choice.