Learn what basic information you need to create a new Event Listing for the Calendar of Events on the University of Southern Maine's public website .
Definitions
- Cognitive load: The mental energy or effort a person uses to understand and interact with a website
- Searchable text: Text on a webpage that can be copied and pasted into an email, social media post, or text message, etc.
- Searchable text contributes directly to search visibility and SEO
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The practice of improving web content to be more visible in search engine results
- Call-to-action (CTA): What you want someone to do, or the "action" you want them to take, on a specific webpage
- e.g., buy tickets or register to attend an event
How-to
What do you need help with?
- Event title
- Event description
- Event date(s) & time(s)
- Event location
- Event contact
- Event image(s)
- Event registration links and calls-to-action
- How to create an event listing in the Calendar of Events subsite
Detailed information
INFO: Get a quick overview of the Calendar of Events in WordPress and some benefits of using the public calendar to post your events.
Launch the presentation .
Event title
Make sure your event title is descriptive, but also short and easy to scan. This reduces cognitive load for website visitors as they browse through long lists of events.
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Event description
Be as specific as possible! Paint a picture for your audience when describing your event.
- Why should they want to go?
- What can they expect to happen?
- How will they benefit from attending?
- Where do they need to show up — a classroom, a lab, a lecture hall, etc.?
- Include the room number if there is one; this information is not available in the Event Location field
WARNING: If you include hyperlinks in your description, they must meet
digital accessibility requirements . Full URLs must be hidden behind descriptive text that explains what to expect when that link is clicked (e.g., "Learn about parking at USM", or "Get the full season schedule").
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Event date(s) & time(s)
You'll need a start date and time, as well as an end date and time.
This is required for WordPress, but attendees want to know what their time commitment will look like.
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Event location
WordPress has a library of available on- and off-campus locations, but it's not granular to the room level (unless it's a space, like Talbot Hall).
Off-campus events
If a USM department/office is not the primary host (or co-host) for the event, it doesn't belong in our WordPress Calendar of Events. If attendees have questions about events listed on our website, we want to provide a dependable University contact, not an unpredictable third party.
Online events
In WordPress, you can select a "Zoom" option, and there's an "Online" checkbox.
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Event contact
WordPress has a library of available department/office event contacts. If multiple departments/offices are co-hosting, choose a primary contact for the event.
Ideally, your event contact information should be a general department phone number and/or email address (e.g., admitusm@maine.edu), not a specific individual. If that individual leaves the university, the Marketing team has no way to know a specific event contact needs to be updated or removed, unless someone specifically lets us know .
An invalid contact on an event leads to frustration for attendees trying to reach someone who appears to be ghosting them — especially if they are trying to request accommodations ahead of time.
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Event image(s)
Featured images or images added to the event description area are intended to support the searchable text in the Event Listing. Ask yourself if your final Event Listing makes sense both with and without the image.
The featured image for an event appears in different styles of upcoming event lists on the Calendar of Events subsite and in Event Carousels embedded on department/office subsites. Because this image appears in a variety of spaces and a variety of sizes, it's important to understand the specific requirements for event images:
WARNING: Text overlaid or embedded in images violates digital accessibility requirements.
When creating images for your event, keep in mind that screen readers cannot "see" text embedded in an image, so that information is invisible to website visitors who rely on screen readers to navigate our website. Even users with perfect vision may not be able to read embedded text on smaller screens and mobile devices because as the image size shrinks, the text does, too; the text also could be clipped or hidden at different screen sizes (i.e., mobile phones or tablets).
Your images don't need to be entirely void of embedded text — just use it sparingly, include descriptive alt text, and don't rely on the image to convey all the event details. Read this quick overview about graphics with text from the University of Michigan .
If you don't have an image for your event, you can select the default image in WordPress for the Featured Image (search "default" in the Media Library from the Featured Image field to add it to your Event Listing).
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Event registration links and calls-to-action
WARNING: Per UMaine System IT, don't publish Zoom meeting/webinar links on the public website for security reasons.
You can add one or two call-to-action (CTA) buttons to your Event Listing in WordPress. One appears with the event description, and one appears with the date, time, and location information at the bottom of the page.
If you are using Eventbrite or Google Forms for tickets or registration, you can add that URL to one or both CTA buttons. You could also use one button for ticket purchases and the other to link to related details (i.e., a season schedule).
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Add your event to WordPress
Now that you have prepared everything you need, it's time to add that content to the Calendar of Events subsite.
Learn how to create an event in WordPress
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