Events Website - tips / ideas?

jebuz

Hi Folks,

I am currently planning a new project to develop and manage a large events website. The plan is to allow the site "run itself" by allowing the event organizers create their own accounts and upload their own events as they need. Of course there's still a lot of work to do before the site will be self sufficient, and even then there's still going to be quite a bit of maintenance, that is if I get enough interest!!

Anyway, from a personal point of view and from your experience using other event websites, what features did you like/dislike and are there any features you thought of that would be useful on such a site?

I plan on keeping it nice and simple, in both design and usability. I plan to use Ajax to enhance the user experience by minimal refreshing of the browser and will also implement a simple to use but powerful search tool which would be the focal point of the site. I'm going to use the Grails framework and host it as a tomcat application, If anyone's interested in application development I recommend you take a look at Grails, built on the spring and hibernate frameworks very simple to set up and great documentation out there.

Finally, has anybody got any links to good events websites I could take a look at and maybe get some ideas or pick up on areas that could be improved on.

Thanks for your time!

jebuz

Sorry to bump this, but has anyone got any advice on the above, would really like to hear peoples thoughts before I begin designing... thanks

CuLT

Carsonified and Amiando are two straight forward event sites I've used and found unobjectionable

The less you (as an organiser) or your attendees have to interact with an event site, the better.

Essential features (in my opinion): Email alerts, integration with external calendar providers (facebook, google calendar, for example), SMS alerts, and as this is Ireland and you're presumably offering a paid service, Laser would be a real boon.

Might be worthwhile asking in the Gigs and Events forum btw, web devs aren't necessarily the best people to ask about events sites, I imagine they're quite a niche expertise and you'd probably be better off just hearing from people who use event sites a lot, what they like is good, but it might be more valuable to find out what they dislike.

trad

Is this going to be an irish events website?

If so what on in Dublin/ wicklow/ cork/cavan etc today. A lot of people get up with no plan to the day and it would be great to have a one stop shop with everything on a day by day basis where you can see whats going on where in a clear uncluttered fashion You can list by category, gigs, concerts, recitals, farmers markets, circus, sporting events, air shows whatever.

Don't just limit yourself to just big events.

Blackdagger

Personally I'd use a forum based website for this type of stuff. It would allow discussion of events in forums.

I like vBulletin altho there are lots other free ones out there like phpBB etc. You can find many add-ons for the forums at www.vbulletin.org altho you need to sign up to both sites.

You can add events to the forum calanders and set up different usergroups for different events etc. You can also add a paypal function should your forums/events not be for free. Users can sign up to events and get event reminders from some of the add-ons from the website I mentioned above.