9 tips for building an engaging event website

Your website plays a major role in your events business. First up, it’s a cool shop-front that sings with your personality and branding. It’s also a place where people can find crucial information about your events. And, of course, it’s the ultimate tool for driving ticket sales. Logically then,  there are quite a few boxes to tick when it comes to getting your event website spot-on.

The platform you use, your branding, messaging, SEO factors and even the URL you choose can all have an impact on the success of your site.

If this 👆is unfamiliar territory for you, don’t worry. In this guide, we run through nine top tips for creating an event website that works. 

These tips were put together by Ticket Tailor’s Head of Marketing and Head of Customer Success, as well as the Co-founders of event website builder Plot for a recent webinar 🤓: 

Choose an approach and platform that works for you

Knowing how to set up a website from scratch can be daunting because there are quite a few important upfront choices to make. For example, do you want to work with an agency or freelancer, who can help run the entire project (including aspects like web development, branding and design)? Or do you feel comfortable setting things up on your own, using a website builder with pre-existing design templates? 

When assessing which approach – and which platform – is right for you, some important factors to think about include:

• Cost: Your budget and the size of your operation will largely determine which approach you can take. Working with agencies and freelancers can be expensive, for example, so may require some shopping around. Website builder platforms also come with different associated costs, so it’s important to do your research before committing to anything.
• Speed: How quickly do you need to get your website up and running? Some agencies and freelancers will have quicker turnaround times than others. Or, you might decide that the quickest way of approaching things is to set up a website on your own.
• Features: It’s important to use a platform that has a feature set that suits your events’ needs, and has all the relevant integrations you need.
• Ease of use: Your platform should feel intuitive to use. It’s also important to choose a platform (and/or agency/freelancer) that makes it really easy to make changes to your website as and when you need to. 

It’s worth noting that many of these points also apply to which ticketing platform you choose to use. For example, you want both your ticketing system and website to be easy to use and super-agile – as delays to change can impact your sales. 

Tip: Ticket Tailor offers 5-star, 24 hour customer support 😌. We get back to queries within a matter of minutes, and are always on hand to help you make changes – whether to your listings, ticket types, or something else. 

Create a memorable URL and set up tracking

Your website URL plays a more important role in the success and credibility of your website than you might think. If you already have a recognisable event or brand name that your audience is familiar with, it’s a very wise move to make this your custom URL.

Why? In a nutshell, having a URL that matches your brand name makes your site:

• Look and feel more professional
• Instantly recognisable and easier to find
• Feel more trustworthy

Once you’ve created your custom URL, you should then also set up tracking. This will help ensure you can monitor the success of any marketing campaigns you do. (Tracking means you can see how many click-throughs your URL gets for each specific campaign.)

Tip: Ticket Tailor’s integration with event website platform Plot means you can host your Plot website and Ticket Tailor checkout on the same domain. This can be handy if, for example, you’re pushing out ads and want to track the success of these. It means you only have to worry about tracking one domain for both your Ticket Tailor checkout and your actual website. (Ticket buyers won’t notice your Ticket Tailor software in the background, so there’ll be no confusion.)

Build your brand

Your event website provides the perfect way to show off your event business’s unique personality and brand. This helps to make your business more recognisable, and to generally feel more credible and professional to your potential ticket buyers.

Don’t have a brand yet? Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be as daunting to approach as it sounds. An agency or freelancer can help you create a set of brand guidelines, which will include things like:

• Logos
• The specific fonts you use across your website and marketing materials
• Colour palettes
• Graphics and imagery 

If working with an agency or freelancer isn’t within your budget, you can still work towards creating a clearly defined brand on your own. The key is consistency. Always aim to use the same fonts across your website, pick a colour scheme to stick to, and a general image style to use. 

It’s also worth noting that, as an event creator, it’s likely you have access to a whole host of images and videos from previous events. These can be used to build your brand, and can really help to increase the visual appeal of your website – in turn, making it much more engaging. 

If you’re running your first ever event, you can use stock imagery in lieu of your own photography – Unsplash is a great resource to try for stylish, free images. However, it’s well worth hiring a photographer and videographer to shoot that first event. This will provide you with your very own stock of visual content that can be used again and again to boost your brand.

Get your messaging right

Your website should deliver clear, concise messaging that informs and engages users without overwhelming them. To achieve this, start off by writing up all the key information and details about your event that you think ticket buyers need to know. Do this on a separate document, away from your website platform or builder.

Then, leave your ideas for a day or two, before returning to them to read through everything again. At this point, aim to edit your messaging down, pulling out the most pertinent bits while discarding any unnecessary detail or ‘waffle’. Going through this process a few times is an effective way to hone your messaging so that it becomes ultra-concise and impactful.

This ‘less is more’ approach is crucial for any website – it means users can quickly and easily access the information they need without getting lost in reams of content. Of course, it’s not just about relaying the bare facts – you want potential ticket buyers to feel excited and inspired to attend your event, too. To achieve this, focus on encompassing all that is great about your event in a few, impactful words and sentences. 

Use clear call-to-actions (CTAs)

A call-to-action is a clear direction on your website that prompts a user to take action – for example, to buy tickets or head to your line-up page.

There are some simple rules to follow when it comes to CTA positions for events websites. For example, your ‘Buy Tickets’ button should be displayed prominently at the top right of the screen for a desktop view. And fixed to the bottom of the screen for a smartphone view. 

It’s also worth thinking about what calls-to-action you might need outside of ‘Buy Tickets’. For example, once you’ve sold out of tickets, it can be helpful to have clear CTAs on your website that direct users to useful information and FAQs about your event. This can significantly cut down demand on your customer services. 

For this reason, it’s important you know your website can be changed quickly and easily as you go through your marketing and ticket sales cycle. Planning CTAs ahead of time is the best way to achieve this.

Know your basic SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to a range of measures you can take on your website to help it rank more highly in search engine results pages (e.g. Google results pages). 

It’s important to note that, these days, focusing on the usability of your site, and how helpful it is for actual people, is more important than employing a load of SEO measures to try to get your site to rank highly. (Not only do you want your users to have a good experience, search engines like Google also prefer websites that offer the best user experience – and so are more likely to rank them highly).

Having said that, there are some basic measures you can put in place to help your website rank. These either don’t affect user experience in any way, or actively improve it.

• On-page metadata: Make sure your header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.) are properly applied, and always write up alt text for images. 
• Load time: Google ranks faster websites more highly, as this is better for user experience. We have a whole section on improve website load time below 👇.
• Mobile optimisation: make sure your website works well on mobile, as a poor mobile user-experience can impact its rankings when people search on their smartphones. 
• Sync your events to Google’s event listings: This allows Google to pull your website pages and event details into the relevant event searches.
• Archive old events: Always be sure to archive any web pages related to events that have passed. They may have built up their own good quality search results, so it’d be a shame to waste this by deleting them altogether. 
  
  Keep reading about SEO tips

Watch your loading times

We all know the feeling of waiting for a site to load before eventually giving up. Or getting frustrated with a certain brand because their website is glitchy and annoying. Which is why taking measures to make sure your website loads smoothly and quickly is so important. The last thing you want is for an on-the-fence ticket buyer to abandon their cart because your website was simply too slow.

To make sure your site loads quickly, make sure you always:

• Employ ‘lazy loading’ images – this is where images aren’t loaded until they’re needed, helping to improve a website’s speed.
• Compress images and videos – this is the process of reducing how much data your images and videos take up, without actually altering how they look on-screen.
• Make sure your site is fully optimised for mobile, so there are no loading problems when people are viewing it on a smartphone.
• Think about hosting – platforms like Plot, Squarespace and Wix can handle spikes in traffic, so your website won’t slow down in busy periods. But if you’re commissioning something more bespoke, it’s worth making sure you talk about hosting with your provider. It’s imperative that your website can handle spikes in traffic – say, when your tickets go on sale. If it can’t, your sales could be negatively impacted.

Make sure your set-up is flexible

Event websites are often subject to a lot more changes than other business websites. For example, you might need to change the location of your event, increase ticket capacity, or add an extra venue. In these cases, it’s imperative you can make the necessary changes to your website without delay. 

With this in mind, it’s crucial your website platform can handle such changes quickly and easily. 

💡 Tip: Ticket Tailor’s integration with Plot means you can make changes to your website and event details seamlessly, in just a few clicks. 

It’s worth noting that, if you’re working with a web developer or agency, it can be more cumbersome and time-consuming to request changes to your website. With this in mind, it’s important to check with anyone you’ll hire what their turnaround time will be for such changes.

Get your ticketing right

Your event website is there to sell tickets – so, it follows that it should be very easy for attendees to make their purchase.

To achieve this – focus on the three points, which we’ve already covered in this guide:

• Focus on your CTAs – make sure they’re displayed prominently around your site.
• Always make sure your website is optimised for both desktop and mobile – it’s crucial that the ticket buying process is as slick and easy on each.
• Work on your website’s loading times – and make sure it can handle spikes in traffic.

💡Tip: Ticket Tailor is packed with useful ticketing features that can seamlessly integrate with your website, and which work on both desktop and mobile. For example, our embeddable widgets and embeddable calendars can both be navigated easily from laptops and smartphones 😌.

That’s a wrap! To watch the full webinar, which also explains how to get the most out of Ticket Tailor’s new integration with Plot, head here:

• Webinar: How to build an engaging event website with Plot and Ticket Tailor

And for a full help article on how to build an event website with Plot, head here:

• How to build an event website with Plot website builder