As we start planning for spring and summer events, we want to be sure you know that Event Espresso is your Event Ticketing System for WordPress. Whether you are hosting Art Classes, Car Shows, Conferences, Quilting Retreats, or any other event, Event Espresso makes it simple to sell tickets to each of these events – or all of them at the same time – right from your WordPress website.
With Event Espresso you can: (more…)
Event Espresso is a WordPress e-commerce plugin specialized for online event registration and selling tickets. Just like any other WordPress e-commerce plugin, you have to convert your website traffic from an audience to a customer, or in this case an attendee. It takes work, at the right time you can convert Pending Payment registrations into paying attendees.
If you want to get Event Espresso for the first time, or haven’t renewed in a while now is your chance. If you are a current customer you can save a lot of money by getting 50% off new add-ons.
Offers end December 1, 2015. You must use the links below to receive the discount(s). Active members must be logged-in with an active subscription to receive the ‘Active Members’ price. Discounts cannot be applied retroactively.
| Product(s) | Active Members | New Members |
|---|---|---|
| Developer License (5 licenses) | $279.95 $153.97 | $279.95 $181.97 |
| Everything License (all add-ons) | $279.95 $195.97 | $279.95 $209.96 |
| Personal License | $69.95 $55.96 | $69.95 $59.46 |
| Event Espresso 4 Add-ons: | ||
| Promotions & Discount Codes – add incentives | $79.95 $39.98 | |
| Printable Tickets – offer paper or digital tickets | $59.95 $29.98 | |
| Ticket Scanning – scan bar/qr codes to validate tickets | $79.95 $39.98 | |
| Multiple Event Registration – more events, one checkout | $99.95 $49.98 | |
| Calendar – display your schedule of events | $29.95 $14.98 | |
| WP User Integration – connect WP profiles to reg forms | $39.95 $19.98 | |
| MailChimp Integration – add attendees to your mailing lists | $39.95 $19.98 | |
| People/Staff – organize and display staff by roles | $49.95 $24.98 | |
| Social Sharing – make it easy to share your events | $14.95 $7.48 | |
| Infusionsoft Integration – add attendees to your contacts | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Stripe Integration – use Stripe to process payments | $59.95 $29.98 | |
| Sage Pay Integration – use Sage Pay to process payments | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Vanco Integration – use Vanco to process payments | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| iDeal/Mollie Integration – use iDeal/Mollie to process payments | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Authorize.net SIM – use Authorize.net to process payments | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Table View Template – display your events in a table layout | $29.95 $14.98 | |
| Grid Template – display your events in a grid layout | $29.95 $14.98 | |
| Product(s) | Active Members | New Members |
|---|---|---|
| Developer License (5 licenses) | $549.95 $302.47 | $549.95 $357.47 |
| Business License (most add-ons) | $249.95 $174.97 | $249.95 $187.46 |
| Personal License | $99.95 $79.96 | $99.95 $84.96 |
| Event Espresso 3 Add-ons: | ||
| Ticketing – offer tickets to be scanned at the door | $179.95 $89.98 | |
| Multiple Event Registration – more events, one checkout | $49.95 $24.98 | |
| Recurring Events – schedule your events in the future | $49.95 $24.98 | |
| Custom Files – override certain aspects of the plugin | $39.95 $19.98 | |
| WP User Integration – connect WP profiles to reg forms | $39.95 $19.98 | |
| MailChimp Integration – add attendees to your mailing lists | $39.95 $19.98 | |
| Roles & Permissions Basic – manage staff roles | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Roles & Permissions Pro – manage staff geographies | $119.95 $59.98 | |
| Infusionsoft Integration – add attendees to your contacts | $69.95 $34.98 | |
| Custom Templates – exciting and interesting layouts | $29.95 $14.98 | |
| Accordion Template – display events in a accordion layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
| Calendar Template – display events in a table layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
| Date Range Template – display events in a range layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
| Recurring Events Template – display events in a recurring layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
| Map Template – display events in a map layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
| Grid Template – display events in a grid layout | $19.95 $9.98 | |
Happy Holidays from the entire team at Event Espresso! We look forward to working with you in 2016.
The Promotions & Discount Codes add-on for Event Espresso 4 adds powerful and flexible promotional pricing features to your events. You can create discount codes and promotions that can provide discounts for your attendees when they are registering for an event or buying tickets.
These features allow you to incentivize your audience to purchase more ticket(s) sooner or register for more events, allowing you to run your business more efficiently and make more money.
Here is a brief screencast demonstration for the Promotions & Discount Codes in Event Espresso 4:
As an event organizer, promotions and and discount codes allow you to:
Get help with the EE4 Promotions & Discount codes add-on in our support forums
Ask a pre-sales question about this add-on
Your audience can enter their discount code in the last step of the checkout.
Each promotion code can be configured with a custom message confirming or rejecting a promotion code.
Discounts are reflected individually in the checkout.
The discounts are also reflected on the receipts and invoices.
The Promotions List Table provides an overview of all your promotion codes, the events they apply to, when they are valid, the number of uses, etc.
Each promotion code can be configured with a number of options (see the Promotions & Discount Codes documentation).
The Promotional Discount Code settings allow you to configure if taxes will be applied be fore or after a discount is applied.
The discount is detailed in the Event Espresso Transaction and Registration details too.
We’d like to announce that another Sponsored payment gateway for Event Espresso 4 is available.
Vanco is your specialized payments partner.Vanco Payment Solutions is focused on meeting the unique needs of clients that count on predictable, recurring revenue. Faith-based, nonprofits and other professional and relationship-oriented organizations—and the software providers and professional associations that serve them—rely on Vanco’s specialized approach to adding electronic payment options and enhancing current capabilities. The company’s experienced leadership team helps more than 30,000 clients across the U.S. conveniently, securely and efficiently accept a broad range of payments, including credit and debit cards, and more effectively manage their operations. Vanco leverages extensive experience in specific industries to help clients confidently and continuously meet financial goals and obligations. Industry leaders Vanco Services (founded in 1998) and Veracity Payment Solutions (founded in 2007) recently merged to form Vanco Payment Solutions.
We are focused on delivering electronic payment solutions, and doing it better than anyone else. We’re attuned professionals who listen carefully to understand our clients’ point-of-view. We are specialized in addressing the payment challenges unique to the sectors of those we serve. We are a collaborative team, forging partnerships with clients that inspire innovation and excellence.
Vanco is a PCI Level 1 Compliance Provider.
You can contact them about payment gateway services at: 800-675-7430, info@vancopayments.com or visit http://vancopayments.com/ to learn more.
A month ago, we invited our community to participate in a hosting survey. This WordPress website hosting survey is intended as a public service to the Event Espresso and WordPress communities. Our only interest is to provide these communities more information so they can choose the best WordPress host given their needs.
We are pleased to share the (not-statistically-valid) results of our 2015 WordPress Website Hosting Survey. Hopefully next year you will help spread the word about the WordPress website hosting survey to get more results so the data is more representative. We only included results for hosts with three or more complete responses, but you are free to look at the results yourself.
Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the hosting links and signup, we may receive monetary compensation.
We’d like to take the liberty to share a couple points of interests about these hosts.
As part of our commitment to our active support license holders, we look into the future and try to foresee any problems you may have with updating Event Espresso and WordPress. Our foresight has been clear and fruitful, and with recent updates to Event Espresso, we’re ready for WordPress 4.2 (coming soon).
I wonder if Heraclitus was talking about open-source software when he said:
The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change – Heraclitus
WordPress is constantly changing; new features are added, new methods are introduced, and programmers make mistakes. But, we are constantly monitoring the WordPress codebase to ensure that Event Espresso is as compatible as possible.
Here are a few examples:
Five months ago we noticed that our automated tests were failing because of changes to WordPress 4.1 (which was not yet released). We reported these findings and helped to delay (revert) these changes until they could be improved upon for a future release (now coming in WordPress 4.2).
Two-and-a-half months ago, changes to WordPress 4.2 (not yet released) cause the WYSIWYG to be removed from the: event editor, venue editor, and the attendee (contact) editor. Fortunately the fix is fairly easy. We released this fix in 4.6.16.p (almost a month ago).
About a week ago, we noticed css changes in WordPress caused the Event Espresso admin sidebar to disappear. Since then we have made the necessary changes, tested and released an update in 4.6.20.p (today).
Problems solved.
We are always looking ahead, anticipating and adapting to change. We hope our proactive approach helps you be able to focus more on your events than on your website.
If you have any questions about this announcement, or buying a support license to access the updated files, please contact us.
Twenty Fourteen Theme
In order to sell tickets and collect registrations online, it is important that your website is easy for anyone to access and use. Google is changing their mobile search results algorithms to rank websites higher that give readers easier access to read and interact with their websites. Is your website ready?
On April 21, Google is expanding their use of “mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal”. When this is implemented, worldwide, if you search for something on a mobile device today, then search again on April 21, the list of search results may change depending on if the websites among the search results are ‘mobile-friendly”.
Depending on the type of events you organize, industry and audience, 60% or more of your registrations may come by those using a mobile device (phone or tablet). The number of people using mobile devices is growing fast. So regardless of whether someone is using a desktop computer, tablet or mobile phone, you want your audience to be able to find your events and buy tickets.
If the websites for those search results are not “mobile-friendly”, that website will be penalized and will not appear as early in the search results. However, this does not apply to searches done via a desktop device.
Could this be you?
If you’re using WordPress, then you must evaluate whether you are using a theme that is “mobile-friendly”. Mobile-friendly can mean several things, but I want to describe it in two ways: Accessibility and Ease of Use.
You can use Google’s “Mobile-Friendly” test tool to see if your website will be impacted in their algorithm change or not. This tool gives you more of a pass/fail rating, but offers suggestions for improvement.
If your website/theme is not mobile-friendly we recommend doing two things:
Can people access at all the information on your web pages without it being too cumbersome? Is there information that is hidden behind tables or images or divs, is there media (video, audio, etc.) that does not play on mobile devices?
In order to attract customers, you want to review whether the information you publish is accessible. The more people that can access your websites, the more people are likely to attend, and the more successful we can all be.
Web accessibility is not going away, and requires on-going, conscious, effort and investment.
Determining if your website is mobile friendly should also consider how easy it is to use. The easier to use, the better it will convert visitors into customers.
However, because the screen is small, you will have to compromise. You cannot expect the desktop and mobile-views to be exactly the same. It’s important to prioritize your design so that you present the most important information and functionality first, and the less-important items further down the page.
In general, Event Espresso 4 adopts the layout as dictated by your theme’s blog archive template. So, if your Event Espresso pages are not passing Google’s “Mobile-Friendly” test tool, it will be because of your theme OR a plugin causing trouble . I’ve tested over two dozen free themes with Event Espresso and they all passed as “mobile-friendly”. That doesn’t mean that some of the Event Espresso elements can’t be improved to be easier to use, but they are passing the “mobile-friendly” test so you will not be penalized because of Event Espresso. If you have specific suggestions for improving how Event Espresso responds to mobile devices, please let us know.
See also: Theming in Event Espresso 4
If you have questions about either mobile-friendly event websites, we’re always happy to chat, just contact us.
Note: This article was adapted from the Event Smart Blog article: Google is Changing Their Mobile Search Results Algorithm, are You Ready?
We all remember the first website we built; or if you’re building your first website now then you won’t forget it. I wish someone would have shared their hosting experience with me long ago so that we could have avoided some of the challenges we’ve had trying to find the right hosting for Event Espresso and Event Smart. In light of sharing what we’ve learned, here is our website hosting journey. We hope you will share your hosting story too so other people can learn and have a better experience.
The success of my business is largely dependent upon my websites remaining operational and performing well. If a site doesn’t perform well, it brings in less revenue, revenue that is used to pay the hosting bill, the team salaries, and more. With so much riding on the performance and reliability of the sites, it only makes sense that the platform I choose to host my sites on is one of the most important decisions I can make for my business. If the sites consistently have troubles due to the hosting infrastructure, the business will suffer.
Pippin on You should love your hosting company.
Everyone seems to have a story about their website hosting company. Either you love them, hate them, or have dated them all. This is our brief hosting story.
Chomping at the bit with HostGator
We began our hosting with HostGator because Seth had a reseller account that he used for his freelance clients. Event Espresso began like any other new project (boot strapped) so we didn’t spend a lot on hosting. We wanted to prove we had a good idea and that we could pay our bills before investing in unnecessary infrastructure. Over time, we needed additional processing power so we grew from a virtual machine to a dedicated server. The power of a dedicated server was sufficient for a time. However, HostGator eventually had a lot of service interruptions (sometimes for nearly a full day). I think we were paying less than $200 per month for a dedicated server with the technical specifications we needed, but the service up-time was falling. The interrupted service cost us far more in lost revenue than it cost in hosting fees. We knew we needed to find a better, more reliable host…
Trial and Error by FireHost
At the same time that we started looking for a new host for Event Espresso, we knew we wanted to choose a host with the infrastructure that could support Event Smart. We knew we would need firewall protection, scalability options, redundancy options, etc.
We knew of a specialized “WordPress hosting” company that used the FireHost infrastructure as their core service, so we thought it would be a good fit for our needs. We signed for two servers with FireHost: one for EventEspresso.com and one for EventSmart.com. For both servers, our hosting fees went from $200 per month to about $900 per month. We kind of expected those fees for a more scalable infrastructure, but we also expected things to work better than they did. For the most part, EventEspresso.com worked alright with FireHost. But we had a LOT of problems with the FireHost WAP (web application firewall) and WordPress multisite while trying to build EventSmart.com. We even tried their Advanced WAF but it didn’t work well enough either. In order to give us the service level we needed, FireHost was going to have to buy a new WAF appliance and charge us an additional $1,500 per month. So our hosting fees were going to go from $200 with HostGator to $2,500 with FireHost, and that’s even before we started scaling servers and building in redundancies. FireHost clearly was not going to work for us.
Learning to Swim in the DigitalOcean
Our experience with FireHost taught us a lot. We better understood our needs (especially for Event Smart), and we better understood the server management side of hosting (not the hardware). At this same time, a more simple cloud hosting service began called DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is designed for developers who want or can manage their own servers. They keep things simple in that they limit most of their responsibility to keeping the server on and the datacenter secure. Users (we) are responsible for server configuration, WAF security, server updates, etc. (and I have to say Darren has done a great job at learning and handling this transition). They also use SSD disks which are usually faster than standard disks. This means that we can spin up a new server for as little as $5 – $640 per month. This gave us the option to control the server configuration, firewall protection, etc. for as little as $5 per month. And, if we wanted the top-rated plan it would still be less than it cost with FireHost!
This became a win-win for us. We now have more autonomy, higher up-time, built-in redundancies (especially for Event Smart) and more scaling options than we ever thought we would. We now run 10 VPS servers for less than $200 per month! We have individual servers for testing sites, EventEspresso.com, internal blogs, several servers forEventSmart.com (redundant databases with Hyperdb, etc.), servers just to collect and store backups, etc.
Needless to say, we love Digital Ocean! There have been small hiccups here and there (a few internal network interruptions), but these interruptions have been only momentary inconveniences. We HAPPILY use DigitalOcean to host EventEspresso.com and EventSmart.com (our cloud-based SaaS event registration and ticketing platform). We don’t claim to be server experts, but for the most part we don’t have to worry about the interruptions or cost that existed with our prior hosts.
Note: HostGator and FireHost may have improved their services since we were customers. You are welcome to try (or continue to use) their services.
Using a host you LOVE or HATE? Want to share your website hosting story with others? Please fill out this survey and we’ll share the results in a future blog post OR use the comments section below to go into detail.
Sage Pay is known as one of the most trusted payment companies in Europe.
Included as standard with Sage Pay:
According to Sage Pay: 63% of consumers feel more assured shopping online with Sage Pay.
If you operate your business in Europe, and currently use a simple payment option like PayPal Standard, you might consider the Sage Pay payment gateway integration for Event Espresso 4 to offer a better shopping experience and more security.
Get help with the Sage Pay payment gateway in our support forums
Ask a pre-sales question about this payment gateway.