How to Create a Successful Event Management Website

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By Graeme Benstead

Planning

What are the objectives your event management website?

The first thing to consider when planning a website is what your site's objectives are.

Is your site being built to sell services or products, to communicate information or just to immerse users in your brand?

With objectives you can measure the success of the site.

Who are your audience?

Next you should think about what sort of people will be using your site.

Do some market research to find out what sort of people are most likely to use your services. Will it be consumers looking to purchase your event management services or users searching for inforamtion? Consider whether your audience is likely to be from a particular industry, age group, gender or social background.

By knowing your target audience, you can make sure that you provide them with what they want.

Design

Is your event management website's design appropriate for your audience?

Make sure that your site's design is aimed at the people viewing it.

A business to business event management website is expected to have a sober clean design. Conversely, a site promoting event management to a younger audience is expected to have a brighter, fresher design.

The first impression a user will get from your site is its design. Giving the impression that the site is related to the user wants can improve the chances of potential customers buying your products or services.

Is your event management website's content useful and relevant to your audience?

Studies suggest that users decide within just 7 seconds whether your site is any good for them.

Make sure that a user can find a reference and a link to the information they are looking for as soon as they arrive on your site. Make sure that you list your event management services to be visable soon as the user arrives at your site.

Make sure this information is objective and concise; users are much more impressed by clear, relevant copy than by paragraphs of marketing copy.

The most reliable way to increase traffic and inbound links to your site is to provide unique, useful information for your target audience. Try to add content which is unavailable anywhere else be it tutorials on event managment, event management whitepapers, games, tools or anything else that a user might find useful.

Once you have added this content make sure that it is advertised on relevant event management forums, email newsletters or any other way that will reach your target audience.

Can people find your event management website?

The higher your site ranks on search engines for words that your target audience search for the more traffic you will receive. Improving your site to rank better on search engines is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are currently 580 million sites listed in google for the term "event management". Each of these sites is direct competiton in terms of your internet marketing.

To build a site which ranks well for your chosen key phrases you must consider:

• Keywords - Identify the phrases that your target audience will be searching for, the more specific the phrase the better. "Event Management" is fine keyphrase but a specific phrase like, "brighton event management" you will mean you have less competiton in the search listings.
• Content - Try to include your chosen keywords in every aspect of the page, areas to consider would be:
• Title - Search engines consider the title to be the most important piece of content on a site
• Headings - Headings are also extremely important to the search engines. structure yourh headings well for the best results
• Paragraphs - The closer a keyword is to the top of the page the better. Include the keyword event management in the first paragraph if at all possible
• Alternative image text (alt tags) - Adding alt tags to all of your images is important for both SEO and usability
• Metadata - Well chosen content in both you keywords and description tags benefit SEO
• Inbound links - Sites linking to your site will also improve your rankings. You must remember:
• The more relevant the site is to your own, event mananagement or event marketing sites in this case, the more the link will benefit your rankings.
• A great way to get more inbound links is to provide useful content on your site. Introduce free event management inforation that a user will find useful.
• A reciprocal link, a link from a page which you link back to, is not as beneficial as a purely inbound link.
• Use free web directories such as Pickal.com for free inbound links... every little counts.

Is your event management website easy to use?

A user should not have to think about how to use your site.

Your navigation should be clear and easy to use; the headings on the navigation should be descriptive. And if you are using subheadings they should be categorised under a relevant title.

To improve usability include links to your most commonly used pages, for example you event managemet services page, in the main content of your home page. Use relevant graphics and headings to draw the user's eye to these links.

You should not overcrowd the page with content. Break any copy up with relevant headings so that a user can easily pick out the information they want.

Make sure that the user can always link back to the home page and the previous page they where on. If they are inside a category make sure they can link back to the main page of that section. For example, if you have a main event management services page with sub categories for individual pages such as conference management, make sure each subpage has a direct link back to the event management page.

Is your site accessible to all your users?

As of October 12th 2002 Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ' 794d), "agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others."

These accessibility standards can be met by following a set of guidelines set by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) and Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Just a few of the issues you should look at to make your site standards compliant include:

• Images - You should include alternative image text (alt text) for any images on your site (or any other content communicated without the use of text, for example flash animations or sound files).
• Colour - Make sure that any information communicated by colour is also available without colour.
• Content - Structure and organise the information on your site clearly. A page should read correctly even without its associated style sheet.
• Use clear and simple language throughout your site.

You can view the full list of guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html.

Creating an accessibility standards compliant site not only helps users without the means to view your site correctly, it also benefits your search engine optimisation. If your site is built well your pages content will be easily available and you will get better rankings.

Summary

Building an effective event management website requires thought and planning in a number of different areas. From market planning and good design practices each aspect overflows into each of the others.

To create a truly effective site, instead of treating the process as a set of tasks to work through individually we should approach the process as a whole.

Carry out your market research with the content that you will be providing and your design in mind. Write your copy and code your site using good practices in SEO, Usability and Accessibility. Ultimately remember that an event management website can be perfectly optimised in terms of code and link marketing but if the content on your site isn't useful to your audience your site will not be truly effective.