Last year OLG redesigned the Arts United website, arming the organization with a vibrant and fully manageable website that allows them to keep fresh and updated content at all times. We recently tackled phase two of the Arts United website refresh—an arts events calendar. This tool allows patrons to easily peruse various arts and cultural events happening in the community, and even purchase tickets quickly and easily.
The website continues to use the Arts & Culture Forecast, a quick overview of the next five scheduled arts and cultural events, displayed on the Arts United homepage. But now you can click through to view the full events calendar. The full events calendar has an extended forecast at the top of the page. Inspired by functionality on weather forecast pages, the extended forecast allows you to scroll through the next 15 events.
But beyond just the forecast, now you can checkout Arts United events months ahead. You can checkout the full calendar view or list view, whatever your preference, and see all the upcoming activities happening in our community. Let’s say you have guests coming into town and want to checkout what events are happening on a particular weekend. Just scroll through to that date and see what’s on the calendar. And if the event requires tickets, easy—you can click on the “Get Tickets” button and purchase tickets for the event using Arts United’s new ArtsTix online ticketing system.
Or maybe you want to scroll through events based on a particular category. You’ll notice we have a list of categories along the left side: Visual Art, Music, Cinema, Heritage, Theatre, Festival, Dance and Community. You can click on any of these to filter events by a particular category. Looking for a particular organization’s events and not sure what category it’d be under? At the bottom of the page, there is a list of what Arts United organizations are included in each category. And not only does each category have a custom illustrated icon, but they’re color coded! So when looking at the full calendar view, you can quickly see what type of events are listed and what category they fall under.
But I think one of the best things about this new events calendar page is that it can introduce you to new arts and cultural events that you may not have otherwise attended or even known about. Maybe you’re a devoted fan of the The Phil, and you go online to find their next performance and purchase tickets, but while on the events calendar page you notice a film you may want to checkout that’s playing at the Cinema Center, or a Civic Theatre performance you’ve got to see. It’s so exciting to think that not only is this calendar an easy way to access details on your favorite arts events, but it may also introduce you to other exciting happenings in the community.
So not sure what to do this weekend? Tomorrow? Or even tonight? Checkout the new Arts United events calendar page and see what’s happening.
