This month we’re featuring the excellent implementation of The Events Calendar Pro and Filter Bar add-on by Connext.vet. Connext is a digital resource that helps new veterinary professionals connect and learn from each other. They make it easy for vets to find industry events and experts that will take their careers to the next level. It’s a worthwhile mission and we’re proud that our tools are helping them achieve it.
In this post we’ll explain what makes their calendar a great use case to learn from. We’ll also provide some callouts for possible improvements they could make. Let’s get into it!
The Main Events Page
In the sections below we’ll take a closer look at the events page and discuss what they’re doing right (most of it) and a few tweaks that would make their calendar even better.
General Design
When you navigate to the main events page, one of the first things you notice is the clean, uncluttered design that matches the rest of the website. From a presentation perspective, this is incredibly important as it demonstrates a certain level of professionalism every website wants to project. It also keeps the visitor’s attention on what’s important–the events!
Featured Images
It’s worth drawing special attention to the featured images here since this is one of the most common mistakes we see users make. Notice how each image is unique to the event it’s attached to and they all share the same size and resolution. This consistency goes a long way towards a professional presentation.
Typography
Another strong point here is the typography. The mistake we see often is a poor font size hierarchy and consistency. If you’re using The Events Calendar or Events Calendar Pro with a theme that’s compatible with it (which should be most themes) then the default font sizes should be as follows:
- Abbreviated day – 12px
- Day number – 24px
- In-line date – 14px
- Title – 24px
- Location – 14px
- Description – 14px
- Ticket price – 12px
Problems seem to arise most often when folks veer away from the default sizes, either because their theme overrides them or they want to further customize the appearance of their calendar. Of course there’s nothing wrong with doing further customizations, but if you do, take note of how these elements are sized and try to maintain the same relationships. For example, if you change the in-line date size, make sure the location and description match it.
Views
Another issue to watch out for when it comes to your calendar design is how the different views you’ve chosen to display look. In Connext’s case, their Month view also looks great.
As you can see they’ve also made sure to update the color of events to match their site’s color scheme. They also did a good job of making sure their hover card is easily readable and properly formatted. Again, if you have a theme that’s compatible with The Events Calendar then this isn’t something you have to worry about.
Navigation
By adding Filter Bar to your events calendar, you can create filters to help users narrow down events. And if you have both Events Calendar Pro and Filter Bar, you can create custom filters, just like Connext does on their calendar.
Connext’s use of custom filters are unique but extremely effective. The custom filters include conference focus, species, and role. These niche filters help visitors discover the events they’re most interested in with ease. Which is important when you have a calendar as full as Connext’s.
They’ve also taken advantage of Filter Bar’s search bars. In the examples above, Connext adds these search bars to the city and state filters where there are so many options, searching for what you want is likely faster than scrolling.
General Calendar Best Practices
They also follow other general event calendar best practices, such as:
- Keeping their calendar up-to-date.
- Posting events with plenty of time in advance to gain interest, sign up registrants, and sell tickets.
- Utilizing event meta-data such as venues, organizers, and more so that event filters are possible.
Single Events Page
Now let’s switch our attention to the single events page. First, we’ll look at the page layout and then we’ll look at how they’re using that page layout to promote their events.
The first thing we noticed is that Connext’s event page layout is different from the default layout that The Events Calendar ships with. That’s because they’re using Elementor! With Elementor they’ve created a custom page template for their events that allows them to re-arrange the page elements such as venue details and map, cost, website, organizer, tags, etc. however they want to.
They’ve created a somewhat complex layout that uses a combination of TEC Elementor widgets and custom elements. For example, they’ve added some custom information cards for “Hotel Info”, “Exhibitor Info”, and “Speaker Info”. There’s also a few places for ads.
Overall we think they’ve done a great job creating a custom single event page layout for their brand. However, there are a few callouts we’ll get into below that will help them fine tune this template for an even better presentation.
Event Listing Best Practices
Now let’s take a look at how they’re using this custom event listing to promote their events.
Clear event title
Event titles are very important because they communicate what the event is about. Connext creates good titles that provide relevant and concise information about the event. We found that a title like “VMX: Veterinary Meeting and Expo 2025” tells us exactly what we need to know: it is an annual meeting and expo. From there, we can read more about it.
Proportional featured image
A proportional image on the events page limits distraction and adds focus to more important details. On this page, the photo does not overshadow the rest of the information. If the featured image is too big on the page, the most important information could be out of sight and below the fold.
Accurate and helpful event details
Whether it’s the custom info cards they’ve added or the normal event details normally found on an event listing using The Events Calendar, Connext does a good job of filling everything in and making sure the essentials are covered.
Areas of Improvement
We’re really impressed by this calendar! They’ve used Events Calendar Pro and Filter Bar to create a seamless calendar that is no doubt helpful to their community. We also love to see them taking advantage of our integration with Elementor.
That said, there are a few areas of improvement we noticed that could take their calendar up a notch.
- Make getting to the calendar more obvious: On the website’s homepage, the link to the events calendar is not very prominent. Making the text bigger may draw more users to take the call to action. Additionally, this CTA could be made into a button (rather than text) to make it stand out. Another suggestion would be having a navigation menu on the home page with a link to the events page.
- Adding the events calendar link to the footer: Although the simplicity of the footer is appreciated, there is room for more text without making it cluttered. We recommend taking it as an opportunity to link the events calendar!
- Match button shapes on the Calendar page: On the events page the search button and the top menu bar’s button are two different shapes. Making these styles match will help make the integration of The Events Calendar into their website more complete.
- Longer event descriptions: On the single events page, the event description is always brief. A longer description can benefit both Connext and their community. A longer event description can further optimize SEO and create a stronger CTA. In return, users can gain more insight into the event which increases the likelihood of attendance.
- Make it easier to buy tickets: They do a great job of letting folks know how much the event costs, however it’s not obvious where or how to get tickets. Making this more obvious by adding information and links in the event description will likely result in more conversions.
Make your own Event Calendar today!
Looking into Connext’s events calendar has been delightful. They create a simple, clean, and cohesive calendar that is consistent with their branding and easy for users to navigate. We’ve enjoyed looking at their calendar and events pages and showing you the areas that they’ve excelled at. We also highlighted several areas of improvement (because who doesn’t want to keep getting better?) Thank you, Connext, for giving us a great example of a featured calendar with Events Calendar Pro and Filter Bar!
If you’re looking to start an events calendar, we have a full suite of plugins available to help with all of your event and ticketing needs. You can request a demo site so that you can begin for free! As you try our products, we’re here to help you as questions arise. Contact us anytime!
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