In an age where every aspect of our daily lives is increasingly becoming more and more virtual, events are no exception. Your event website has to convey all the necessary information while offering a seamless experience for your audience. Regardless if the event itself is virtual – or just the tools to promote and handle the logistics – the website where you promote your event is paramount to ensure the success of your event. With so much riding on the online presence for your events’, it is important to work with seasoned professionals who have the professional and industry knowledge to make your event website into a well oiled machine. You’ll want to make sure your developer (plugins, themes, etc.) knows all the requirements of your event registration and ticket sales website to ensure that it’s functioning properly (and of course will also make sure that it looks good!).
To shed more light on this, we’ve interviewed WordPress expert Chase G. from Codeable. Codeable is the only WordPress-exclusive freelancer marketplace with highly vetted WordPress experts that also know Event Espresso. We trust our partners at Codeable for high-quality development and customization services that are outside our own scope of support and customizations to ensure customers are successful with their website and the event registration plugin.
WordPress expert Chase G. from Codeable
Introduction to Chase – tell us about your background and experience in development.
I’ve been working in web development for over 8 years, and have been working with Event Espresso for the past year (Codeable’s been a huge part of that). I’ve been working with Codeable for two years.
What are 5 reasons to hire a seasoned professional for your organization’s event (virtual or in-person)?
- Design/UX
Event Espresso offers a very clean and straightforward way to sell tickets online for events, which creates a baseline experience for the user registration process. However, some customers need the checkout process for their events to support specific business logic processes and/or reflect a specific user experience unique to their brand.
For some sites, the default experience with Event Espresso works perfectly. But if client finds that their registration and ticket purchase process doesn’t feel like a polished, coherent experience, that’s where a developer can come in and make it feel natural for the user and on-brand for the business. When creating a website (and brand) for a business from scratch, or integrating Event Espresso into an existing site, a seasoned developer can help make the experience fluid for users, so there is complete harmony as they move from the event’s registration page and through to the check out process.
- Custom registration/payment
Event Espresso offers very robust functionality for events, aimed at selling tickets and/or registration for an event (virtual or in-person), but there are some organizations that may have special or unique requirements.. There are many ways in which an organization or an event might require custom development (and possibly help to think through this registration strategy). For example, perhaps the individual (or group of people) attending the event might not be the actual person who purchased the tickets or registered themselves. Oftentimes an office manager or someone else will purchase tickets for several people at once, but still need the tickets to display different individual names, or perhaps the organization wants a custom data report, etc.
- Custom business logic
Custom development may also be needed when the inventory of the tickets is not based on the number of tickets sold or perhaps they need to set the ticket prices to fluctuate, for example. Most customization requests that I see for event websites are when the description or attributes of an event or ticket is unique to that organization. There are add-ons related to this that an experienced developer can recommend and implement.
An example of this custom business logic is when someone wants to sell more tickets for a series, and requests bundles of tickets together for a series (where each event is held on a different date), this would require customization. You could get someone hooked into the series by offering the first event for free, then get them to register for future events so they come back for more info.
- Integrations involved with virtual events
For virtual events (events that are held online only), there is usually some software integration involved. There is an unlimited number of combinations to integrate that software with Event Espresso. Many clients will need development help to customize the event streaming experience. It’s entirely possible for the virtual event environment to run independently from the website/registration process. However, you will see a better user experience if there’s smooth integration between the two. A common example is to have the attendee’s unique passcode for the event provided by Event Espresso.
- Complexity
Because Event Espresso is so robust, it can be complex to customize and therefore require a qualified professional. What can often appear as a simple task, may in fact require a great deal of considerations that need to be accounted for to function seamlessly with the existing software. If you hire a developer from the “budget bin”, you might get burned on your project and possibly expose your website to security risks, or cause software instability which could interfere with updates to your code or your plugins and themes, and etc. If you want to be sure that your project is done right, hire someone with experience who can truly understand the scope of the project and how to implement it properly.
Do you have any final thoughts on how someone experienced like yourself could help someone to make sure their event website is successful?
Another great reason to hire an experienced developer is to ensure the success of the event website. Also an expert will be familiar with all of the Event Espresso product extensions called “add-ons” (and potential combinations of those add-ons) that will work really well to help the client accomplish the goals for their event website.
Working with someone who is the master of a craft as complex as web development is well worth it to ensure the success of both your event website and in the case of virtual events, ensure the success of your event. This seasoned professional should have at least 3-5 years of experience in web development and should have experience with Event Espresso and know how to utilize it to its full potential to meet the needs of your event website. There are many experts at Codeable who have this expertise under their belt and would be happy to help with your Event Espresso website!