Site critique...and help!

wheres me jumpa

Guys,

Just set up the following and would appreciate your suggestions. Content is a bit bare at the moment but hope to have a lot more events/venues and acts in soon.

www.carlowentertainment.ie

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And now for the help!

When somebody is adding an event that will occur every Saturday how do I handle this? At the moment im just entering the event one week at a time, I have been trying to find a script but struggling so far.

Also it nots just going to be every Saturday night, could be two nights a week, fortnightly, monthly etc.

Cheers

Jumpa

Webmonkey

Not too difficult to do a custom php script for this. PM me if you need a hand though my time is limited.
Unfort. the site doesn't seem to be able to load, server problems.

wheres me jumpa

Havent noticed any problems with it.

PM sent.

Rollo Tamasi

wheres me jumpa wrote:

And now for the help!

When somebody is adding an event that will occur every Saturday how do I handle this? At the moment im just entering the event one week at a time, I have been trying to find a script but struggling so far.

Also it nots just going to be every Saturday night, could be two nights a week, fortnightly, monthly etc.

I have half an events calendar done for a site i'm working on. It allows user registration, the ability for a user to creat a new event (add info /price/place/name/time/date/weekday), upload a poster (resized per ratio on the server), view their archive of events and update their details.

It's about 70% done. I must add a recurring event feature actually, didn't think of that.

One way around this actually is to install VBulletin on your server and use RSS to parse the first post in each thread located in an "Events" category, allow guests to start threads but have the forum moderated so that you need to accept the threads and hey presto you have an Event Guide on your site with very little coding.

PHPBB has very few RSS features, i'm not sure about PunBB. (in case you don't want to pay for vb)

wheres me jumpa

I was looking at some calendar scripts but I didnt want something that wouldnt blend in with the site. The option you took to develop your own is the only solution however Im happy with the process I have in place, user adds event, i review it and publish it. Any updates will be handled via email, ie im not too pushed about developing as full an app as yours as I just dont think the volume of traffic will require that much detail.

Rollo Tamasi

Something’s I would be concerned about after looking over the site:

the lack of a logo and any instantly recognizable imagery
the lack of images in general, the site is very text based
Maybe on the homepage if you went for a 3 column layout you could add a column featuring a banner for in house advertising. This would stretch your site down of course as you're narrowing your text/main content area but people don't mind scrolling if there is a good reason for it
I’d maybe go for a more interactive menu system too, the blue links are a very default look while the main nav is a bit plain

good things:

the coding is spot on
the pages are very accessible
good content
consistent

things to consider:
SEO, maybe a few mod rewrites on your php based urls?
Affiliation with other regional sites
a forum
advertising
a gallery
improving end user interaction with the site
edit ^: for example a comment system or a guestbook, shoutbox,



I'm surprised there aren't any more comments here about jumpas site, the fact that you included a request for help with a script has probably tarnsished the responses a bit.....

wheres me jumpa

Cheers Rollo,

I do plan on adding some adverts. However I was focusing on just getting a base of acts and events first.

A gallery will be in there, im hoping to have pictures of nights out in the town up, hope to get some in this week.

Linkage I deliberately left as default but in hindsight it does look a bit bland.

Main nav im stumped on, what would you suggest?

I would love a logo but financially im not in the position to pay for one and design definitely isnt my thing!

Rollo Tamasi

Re: Logo
Have you tired the arts/design forum here? I went up there before looking for a critique on a logo I did and when I returned to the thread the next day about 4 guys made an attempt at bettering the logo (which wasn't hard btw)

I ended up using one of their logos in the end. If you attempt something or give a brief I’m sure you'll get some good responses.

Re: Links
Since we are both working on similar type event/club sites I’ll give you some code I have written for a links page....need to finish a design first. It'll be ready this weekend at the earliest...

Re: Gallery
Is the gallery going to be user based? Can they create new galleries themselves ala bebo?

Re: Adverts
To do adverts I’d say you'll need to change your layout slightly. I'm using phpadsnew as my advertising software. It's a nice package. Open Source. Takes a while to get into but it's worth it in the end. You can setup "ad campaigns" and declare that you want ad X to be displayed at max 2,000 times per month and so on...there are a lot of conditions and the like...

Re: Nav
I'd probably do a CSS roll over, with b/g colour, which displays some "alt" text in a <div> just under the menu.