We’re always improving the product here at Festology, listening to what you love about our event-building software and what you wish it could do for your event.

So, today, we’re announcing streamlined pricing (and free website upgrades).

If you already have a plan, nothing changes for you. For new events, you’ll have a choice between a 1 series/year plan and a 4 series/year plan. In practice, that should cover everyone who isn’t an agency. If that is you, you can contact us to customize Festology.

Gone is the lowest end price point, because frankly, nobody wanted it! We’re modifying this old plan and hope to announce a free plan soon. So this is a non-announcement about that.

And because no one asked for it, we’re also upgrading all of your sites to be faste, to protect you site against day-of-event traffic spikes and other technical stuff that you don’t care about. As always, Festology handles all this for you automatically: software upgrades, hardware, web servers…

Thanks for letting us power your event website!

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We know that honest website feedback is hard to come by, so we’re doing our part to help by reviewing event websites right here on the Festology Blog.

If your event website is a giant scary monster, or if it’s a new event and you’re looking for an outsider’s perspective, this is your chance for free and real feedback on design, SEO, navigation, social media and more!

Send us a reply @eventwebsites on Twitter and we’ll consider your site for review. We’ll tell you (and everyone else) what’s great and what sucks about it. No event is too big or too small!

What are you waiting for? Submit now!

Related posts:

1. 6 SEO Tips for Making Your Event Website As Good As Your Event

Your website. Is it under your control? Or is it a continual source of disappointment? If your event website is underwhelming, there are a number of (free!) steps you can take to be found in search engines, to connect to social media, and to generally play to your event’s strengths.

1. Slice Your Event Into “Social Objects”

If you have a list of speakers and a downloadable schedule, that’s fine. It’s what everyone does. But Amazon.com’s homepage isn’t a long list of a million books, and Flickr’s homepage isn’t a long list of a five billion photos. Every book has its own page and every image has its own page. That means each one is a searchable, sharable “social object”. If the focus of your event is its speakers, does each speaker have a sharable, permalinked page?

When a speaker is considered to be social object, it’s easier to tweet about and pass around, and you’re empowering that person to leverage his or her own own networks. The same goes for panels, venues, films, bands… and don’t forget your sponsors! Each should have its own permalink that can be easily tweeted or Facebooked or found on Google.

Takeaway: Identify what’s sharable about your event, and use a content management system that lets you make and share those social objects.

2. Optimize for Social Media (aka Social Media Optimization)

For years, webmasters have been told to optimize for search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live/Bing. But with the rise of recommendations and realtime updates, say hello to the new SEO: SMO! (Social Media Optimization)

It’s now critical to optimize for social actions, primarily Facebook likes and Twitter tweets. Each social network has its own quirks just like search engines, but you can cover yourself by thinking of your event in these two categories: technical and editorial.

On the technical side, you’ll want to make sure you have a set of html “meta tags” including titles and descriptions (see #6), links and sharable images (social networks prefer square images). Facebook provides a list of meta tags for the Facebook Like button so you can control how your event’s pieces are shared.

On the editorial side, it’s time to rethink your session names. How will they read as tweets? What’s the catchiest thing about them? If someone were to tweet or retweet it, what would they say? What would they quote? What comment would they add? Your titles should follow my SEO mantra (see #4) of “clear, concise and specific”, but for SMO, add “catchy.”

When that’s all done, include bookmarklets or buttons to make sharing easy. (See the left side of this post. Hint, hint.) Your content management system might already include these tools, you might require a plugin, or you might have to copy and paste html code from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, or other social sites that are important to your event.

Takeaway: Rethink your event’s pieces as a set that includes a title, description and image, and ensure that your website’s pages have unique “meta” tags so you can encourage your eventgoers (and civilians) to share over Facebook and Twitter, not just Google.

3. Remove Your Event’s Biggest SEO Hurdle

Yes, there are many techniques for increasing your position on search results pages, but the best (and free-est) thing you can do for search engine optimization is this:

Run a great event that people care about.

Search engine ranking algorithms are based in large part on the number and quality of other sites linking to you. People link to you (for free) because you’ve made content sharable and they want to share it. Run a great event that people care about and you’ve solved your biggest SEO hurdle.

If people don’t care about your event, your event website is not your biggest problem.

Takeaway: I’m not sure how you missed it, but here it is again: Run a great event that people care about.

4. Simplify Your SEO Practices

Once you are running a great event, you don’t have to stress out over search engine optimization. You can, but you don’t have to.

First, you’ve got to believe that the text you’ve written for humans will work for bots. Write and edit text to be clear, concise and specific to the content on the page. Distilling everything down will help you understand what is about your events that will appeal to eventgoers (and search engines) and this notion will carry most of your SEO efforts. Because SEO is based on links, be sure to link appropriate things to appropriate places and verify that links include your keywords. For photos of your speakers, that means including “alt” text.

Now you can go read the other 42 million pages about SEO.

Takeaway: The 99% SEO Mantra: Clear, Concise, Specific.

5. Write Unique Copy

Google’s recent crackdown on “content farms” (where articles are written based on hot keywords) applies to you. You’re not a content farm, but the announcement is a reminder that the big recommendation sites are striving to favor unique content and will continue to do so.

Take an honest look at the language you use to describe your event. Is it unique? Would anyone notice if you switched it with text from a competing event? Does your text show off what is different about you? It should.

Look at your speaker bios. Are they copied and pasted from official sites? Could you talk to the speaker beforehand, learn something new, and rewrite the bio to have a new tidbit? When people seek out your speaker online, your site could be the one that sticks out because it has new information.

Takeaway: Google knows when you are copying. Be unique.

6. Control Your Titles and Descriptions

When people search for your event on Google, they’re most likely going to get a title and description for your homepage. The same is true for most search engine result pages and social news feeds (like Facebook). Lucky for you, that text is coming directly from your website and you control that first impression via tags in your html “head” section.

First, keep in these restrictions in mind: Title tags should have fewer than 65 characters and description tags should have fewer than 150 characters. You can assume that anything beyond that will not be seen by search engines or humans.

Tackle your homepage first. Write your homepage’s title tag to include your event name, its edition and what it’s about with a snappy tagline. Your description should convey in as few characters as possible what’s great about your event, what you do and why people should visit your website (not just your event). If you have video from your event, let people know in the description. If you’re selling event tickets from your site, let people know in the description.

Next, work on your pages for your speakers (or sessions or venues, etc). Every “social object” (see #1) should have a unique title that begins with the name of that object, not the name of the event. These pages are primarily about the object, not your event. Descriptions should be unique to each social object as well, but keep in mind that when people search for a specific person or session, it often won’t be the description tag that shows up, but a chunk of text from the middle of your page. So, be sure that you have some surrogate descriptive copy next to the name of the object on the page.

Takeaway: Write a unique title and description tag for your homepage, and work with a content management system that creates tags for other pages automatically or allows you to write them manually.

Festology’s content management system was designed to allow fine control over your SEO practices. It’s the only event website builder we know of that can say that. Find out more about Festology, or if you’re already using Festology and not making use of all of its SEO features, check out the step-by-step guide to SEO and Festology.

Have your own tips or thoughts on these tips? Share them in the comments!

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Festology will be at SXSW 2011 and we hope to see you there!

Connect with us to catch up, hang out, and be subjected to a demo, A Clockwork Orange style. Just kidding on the last one. But if you’re running an event, meeting, conference or festival, we’d love to talk to you in Austin and figure out how Festology can meet your needs.

http://festology.com/contact
http://twitter.com/eventwebsites

Map data © OpenStreetMap (and) contributors, CC-BY-SA.

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We love movies at Festology. It’s one of the reasons why we love powering real film festival sites. But if we could make websites for fake conferences or conventions, it would be these ones. (Minor spoilers ahead.)

6. Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010)

Convention: StarkExpo 2010

Was it a great movie? No. But was it a great convention? Hell, yeah! With an appearance by the Iron Man himself, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), StarkExpo 2010 was a do-not-miss fake movie convention. The Expo is also the site of the movie’s absurd robobattle climax. And how often do you get to see an action movie climax set at a convention? Well, on this list…

Bonus: Movie conferences are fake, but they are great opportunities for product placement! Iron Man 2 won the 2010 Product Placement Award for Achievement in Product Placement in a Single Film with 64 identifiable brands represented. Scroll down on the fake StarkExpo2010.com site for a very real list of sponsors.

5. Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003)

Conference: The National Assembly of Hackers Conference

The New Republic’s Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) created fiction and called it journalism. The film shows how the fraud was unraveled when a skeptical online journalist began questioning the existence of a National Assembly of Hackers conference.

Bonus: Check out Glass’s feeble attempt at designing a web page and passing it off as the website of a science software company called Jukt Micronics: http://www.penenberg.com/jukt.html. We considered making a theme based on this design, but we were afraid people would use it, so we didn’t.

4. Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999)

Convention: Galaxy Quest Convention 18

In this sci-fi comedy, the cast of a Star Trek-like TV show play their roles for real when they become enmeshed in an alien war. No Star Trek parody is complete without its own Star Trek convention parody and that’s how this film starts, at Galaxy Quest Convention 18.

3. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)

Conference: WordFest

The weekend is not going well for Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas), an unfocused novelist/professor who smokes pot and wears a pink bathrobe. Tripp’s got a series of problems — the least serious of which is a long-overdue manuscript — and they bubble up on this particular weekend because it’s the university’s annual WordFest writing festival.

Bonus: You can’t have a better opening line to a keynote speech at a writing festival than this: “Good evening. I… am a writer.”

2. The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993)

Conference: Alternatives to Cardio-Non-Invasive Arterial Plaque-Reducing Therapy Convention

We all remember the one-armed man, the near miss with that train, the dive from the dam, the lines “I didn’t kill my wife!”/”I don’t care!”, and of course, the interruption of the keynote speaker at the Alternatives to Cardio-Non-Invasive Arterial Plaque-Reducing Therapy Convention. You can’t call it an action movie without one of those. (See #6 on our list!)

1. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Convention: Security & Surveillance Convention

Between The Godfather Part I and Part II, Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed The Conversation, an under-appreciated work of pure cinema. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert who violates his own professional principles, becoming obsessed with the impact of a recent recording. When Caul attends a security and surveillance convention, he is the envy of exhibitors, but we soon learn how vulnerable he is when he himself is bugged.

Bonus: Learn from Harry Caul’s mistake: If you ever attend a surveillance convention, don’t accept the swag!

Got your own favorite conferences in movies (now that you’re thinking about it)? Let us know in the comments! You can follow us on Twitter @eventwebsites or get Festology for your conference at festology.com.

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Welcome to the Festology Blog! You’ll hear more and more from us over the next while, but for now, we’re excited to announce on the blog that Festology, the fast, easy-to-use website builder for events, conferences and festivals, is now available to the event professionals community!

• Sign up for one of our ridiculously affordable plans.
• Read a giant list of Festology’s features.
• Follow us on Twitter @eventwebsites.
• Subscribe to the Festology blog.

Festology is the fast, easy-to-use website builder for events, conferences and festivals. Event managers finally have a way to manage complicated events — with films, bands, sponsors, venues, social networking, comments, tickets and more — at a fraction of the costs of an agency, with total design control, and no coding required.

Get started!

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