Keep Your Customers Informed with the Events & Calendar Web App

July 18, 2021

Your utility organization’s website is a great way to keep your visitors informed on upcoming events. We will walk you through how to use the Events & Calendar app before your new site is launched, but rest assured it is easy to navigate and intuitive to use. In this article, you will get a sneak preview of some of its features to help better prepare you.

Home & Interior Pages

Your homepage will have a dedicated section for Events, assuming you choose to display them. Here, the visitor will get a preview of a few upcoming events, with the option to continue into each event for more details. There is also a View More Events button that will navigate site visitors to an interior page that lists all future events. To add, remove or modify events, you will need to log into your website. You’ll be taken to the dashboard, where you’ll find our signature collection of web apps. Locate Calendar & Events and click on it to access the next screen.

Event Date & Event Location

The first two sections with fillable fields will let you input a start and end date and time for the event. You can be as specific as you want. Next, you’ll input facility and address information, with the option to include a map and a link to step-by-step directions with Google Maps, which is very convenient if you’re already in your vehicle and using your smartphone.

Event Description

Below, you’ll find the Event Description section, where the center of the screen will have a text editor that looks like Microsoft Word. Here, you can do things like:

Align paragraphs,
Bold or italicize text
Create bulleted or numbered lists
Add images from your media library
Link to other pages
Create different layouts using rows and columns
Add clickable buttons
Select from a wide range of different fonts
Add embedded forms

All these options are presented with an easy-to-use graphical user interface – just select the action you want to take and click! For more advanced users, you can switch from the “visual” tab to the “text” tab, enable HTML rules to be written right in the text editor.

Additional Event & Contact Information

You can add more details as needed, such as whether people should arrive early because of long lines, or if there is limited seating available. Add contact information for whoever oversees answering the public’s questions and include business hours, so people know when to call or email.

Banner Images

Just below the global navigation, on interior pages, is where banner images typically appear. They add some visual interest to the page and are often related in some way to the content on the page they appear. More generic images work too, provided they relate positively to our utility organization – a linemen wearing a helmet with your company’s logo, for example. You can add specific images for every event or simply let it auto-populate with banners already being used elsewhere on the website.

Publishing Your Post

Once you’re finished with your post, it’s time to decide when to make it public. You have a few options:

Save your draft and publish it later once you’ve had more time to work on it
Publish it immediately and make it visible to the public
Publish it but keep it private, or make the post password protected so only people you choose can see it
Select date and time parameters so that your post will publish automatically in the future without you having to remember

Conclusion

All these features and many more makes the Events Calendar a great tool to keep the public up to date on future events for your utility organization. It has the bonus of creating a good reason for visitors to frequently revisit your website for new information, and it will help your site with appearing higher up in search results too.