How to Improve your Events Calendar Design

One of the most important things in the success of an event happens steps before the event itself. Taking the time to plan, create and promote your event online through an event calendar is key. However, investing on the events calendar design itself can make it stand out, attracting a bigger audience to all your events.  

1. Reasons to Invest on Events Calendar Design

Increase Website Visitors

An amazing looking events calendar design can attract more website visitors and, consequently, have more attendees. You can boost your audience interaction by having a cool “What’s happening” page, for example. That would help you build a following, drive your traffic up and have repeated and longer visits to your page. 

Appeal to Event Submitters

When wondering how to design a successful events calendar, you also need to consider appealling to event submitters. No one wants to spend several minutes, or even hours, creating and updating their event posts. To keep your submitters engaged and satisfied, you need to provide a user friendly events calendar design for them to submit events with ease. When everything is organized, easy to use and with a touch of charm and creativity, it can lead to event posting increase.   

Attract Advertisers & Sponsors

Creating a captivating special events calendar pages also helps you monetize better. When thinking about spending their limited marketing budgets, advertisers and sponsors will research and compare your calendar to others. They tend to choose the ones they perceive more value in. With an attractive and well organized events calendar, you will stand out from the rest.   

It has been proven time and again in behavioural economics that if something looks more attractive and professional, people are willing to pay more for the item, and the same is true of software and software solutions. If you’re working with an event calendar design that is clean and professional and inviting, then people are more likely to pay to have their event advertised on this calendar, and they’re more willing to pay to attend the events that are listed. This is all thanks to effective and professional event calendar design.

With Timely Event Calendar you can create an amazing looking calendar, with easy to use functionalities and a different range of customizations to suit your needs. See below some tips on how to set up the framework for a great online events calendar design and start your journey with the right foot.

2. Customizing Fonts & Colours

Keep your calendar as a consistent experience with the rest of your site and marketing material. With the Timely Event Calendar you can pick the best font and colour of your calendar to match the visual identity of your brand. If you're just starting your business, now it's the time to set the tone of your brand and create matching themes.

Many businesses have brand guidelines which include a color palette and certain fonts. While Timely can’t match every premium font, we do give you an amazing amount of control over the look and feel of your event post on the Timely Event Calendar.

To customize the best font for your calendar, as well as colour, go to - Dashboard > Settings > Design. If you need help customizing the design of your events calendar design, check our user guide How to Set Up your Account Design Settings for detailed step-by-step instructions.

3. Choosing the Best Calendar Views

Timely’s software also allows you to set the way you want your public to view your calendars of events. You can select several views, including Modern List, Posterboard, Tile, Stream, Agenda, Year, Month, Week and Map views.

All of these views are created to make it easier for your viewers to understand what they’re looking at and to identify which events they wish to attend. Narrowing down to a Month view will give you a very different calendar experience than looking at a Map view, but each serves a very useful purpose in the functionality and usefulness of the calendar.

To choose from the different types of viewing, you can go to - Dashboard > Settings > General > Views.

4. Organizing your Events Calendar Design

A well organized online events calendar design will help you draw more users, sponsors and advertisers to your events. Using the “Filters” feature, you can arrange your calendar in terms of Categories, Tags, Venues and Organizers. You also have the ability to create as many filters as you like for your online events calendar.

Categories

There are lots of events happening around you, even in small towns and narrow niches. How you choose to create special events and categorize them in your events calendar design sends a strong signal to your users of what types of events are available.

With our event management software solutions, you can separate events, for example, in categories like Arts & Culture, Deals & Specials, Nightlife, Health & Fitness, Wine & Dine, or anything else that you would like to label.

Our tool also lets you add a default category image, giving your event a backup image if one isn't provided. Using your own images is best recommended. Making it more local, you create a sense of community and closeness. However, stock images can also be used.

Tags

Consider setting up seasonal (i.e. Holiday), topical (i.e. Burger) or Neighbourhood tags. Your events calendar's tagging system will automatically send all relevant events there. Use them strategically. If you feel creating tags helps brand your site - this takes it up a notch!

Additional Filters

You can consider a filter selection for 'Where', providing a list of neighbourhoods, districts, etc. Another one for 'Type' , where you can separate between concert, festival, conference, workshop, etc. Or maybe even 'Cost', with selections from free, to donation, over $25, and much more. Select your drop down specifically for your audience. If you're a Parenting site, for example, you could define your 'Audience' by prenatal, infant, toddler, etc.

With the Filters tool, you will provide a user-friendly space and guarantee easy navigation for your users. To organize your calendar go to - Dashboard > Filters. If you need help using this feature, please check our user guide How to Organize your Calendar with Filters.

5. Embedding your Events Calendar on your Website

The Timely event calendar design feature also offers you the Embed function. With this tool, you can generate an embed code to be pasted onto your website. It gives you the freedom to choose a different embed code for Calendar, Slider and the Add Event button.

The Calendar code will show your events calendar, according to your specific settings. You can determine the date ranges (i.e. upcoming events, today's events, and custom date range). You can also set the default view and your language of your calendar.

The Slider and Carousel codes are used to feature special events you would like to highlight. You can either put this above your main calendar, or as a standalone event on your homepage. The best candidates for the slide or carousel selection are events that have a bigger audience reach, and have a great visual appeal.

The Add Event Button works in connection with an Event Submission Form. You can have it on the top of your events calendar, and embed it on another page of your site.

We hope our tips have helped you learn how to design an event calendar you build a successful online events calendar. If you still need help, please contact our support team at Contact Us.

Plan a better event with Timely today!