Events, Events and More Events
New West Debuts Next-Generation Event Calendars
By Jonathan Weber , 12-21-06
When we launched NewWest.Net last year, one of our goals was to provide a portal to the culture and events of our dynamic communities. Our first iteration of local, interactive event calendars was somewhat lacking, so we re-doubled our efforts and brought on Colin Hickey, a Missoula musician and man-about-town, to spearhead our efforts. The result is a completely new event calendar service, which we are launching today with local calendars in...
The calendars include listings for all types of events -- music, art, sports, education, business and more -- and are searchable by keyword and category. You can post your own events, and use the calendars for planning future events, all free of charge. You can even take an RSS feed of the events for your personal feedreader or your Web site. Our goal is to provide nothing less than the definitive online events calendar in our local communities, and we'd love to hear what you think. Email Colin at colin@newwest.net.
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Comments
1) The "down arrow" idiom that's used on some of the buttons makes me think of dropdown lists, so there's a conflict between [button] (which does something "big", we're never sure what) and [select], which I expect to show me choices before changing context.
The "Other Cities" dynamic menu in the navigation header uses the more conventional down arrow idiom, so the page design is internally confused.
By comparison, the right-pointing arrow on the [View] buttons for the individual events reads more directly. (If it were me, I'd be tempted to have those individual events pop up in a separate, smaller window.)
2) It would be nice to be able to filter by event category. It is possible to search by category, but this is where a simple dropdown list (or links on the color code?) that rewrote the page to a single category would be good. Multi-select ability would be nice, too - show me Music, and Art, for example.