8 Tips for designing brilliant event websites
When it comes to event marketing tools, nothing is more important than your event website. As the digital “home” of your event, it acts as the single source of truth for everyone involved. It also needs to provide your target audience with enough motivation to register. Finally, your website is a great opportunity to attract potential sponsors and create buzz in the lead-up to the event itself.
That puts a lot of pressure on you to get it right.
You see, an event website that is attractive, engaging, and responsive will be one of your greatest assets. However, there is also a lot of scope for event websites to go wrong – especially if you’re not a professional web designer!
Thankfully, EventsAir is here to help. Without further ado, here are our eight favorite tips for designing brilliant event websites:
- Know your brand
- Know your audience
- Keep it simple with a single call to action
- Make it fast and responsive
- Leverage social proof
- Be considerate with your images
- Create a sense of urgency
- Select the right event technology partner
1. Know your brand
Each event has its own brand and identity, and your event website should be a clear reflection of that. With that in mind, always design your event website to be aligned with the style guide of your event (or the brand that is hosting it). This should always guide selections around color palettes, fonts, images, and other branding elements.
Branding provides a quick visual cue to website visitors about who they are dealing with. It reminds them you have credibility and can be trusted. It will also help create a consistent and cohesive experience when repeated across the event life cycle.
2. Know your audience
You can’t build a compelling event website unless you’ve identified your audience and you know exactly what they want to see. Always refer back to your market research to make sure you’re creating the site with your audience in mind. What information would they be looking for, and how would they like it presented to them?
Your audience should know immediately that the website is for them, so make sure you’ve included written and visual signals. The SaaStr Annual 2023 website does this exceptionally well. As soon as the site loads, you know who the event is for, thanks to both the words (“Join 12,500 Cloud and SaaS Founders, VCs, and Execs”) as well as the compelling video content behind them.
3. Keep it simple with a single call to action
First impressions matter, so you should keep the event website design as clean and simple as possible – particularly “above the fold” (meaning the content that is immediately visible when someone lands on your website). It’s best not to overwhelm visitors with every piece of information on the landing page, so stick to the essentials on the first page – what, where, when, and a link to register. You can always create separate pages with the agenda, speakers, sponsors, and venue information.
We recommend including one call to action (CTA) link or button that pushes visitors to take a particular action. For most events, that will be registering for the event or requesting more information as a sponsor. Aim to include the CTA link or button once above the fold, and at least once more “below the fold” (after visitors have scrolled down the page).
Finally, the visual hierarchy of your site should clearly tell the audience where to focus their attention and in what order. That means paying close attention to where different elements fall on the page, as well as their size.
4. Make it fast and responsive
Websites that load quickly will usually receive more traffic and have better conversion rates. Thus, event websites need to be very fast, so don’t clutter your event website with too much information, unnecessary pages, and large files to download. A simplified agenda embedded in the page should do for most events. You can always offer the option to request a detailed agenda or prospectus in PDF format or link to it from your main website.
Similarly, always build your event website to be responsive, which means it can adapt to any screen size. With more than 50% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices and smartphones, you could be missing out on numerous opportunities if your event website doesn’t perform on all devices.
5. Leverage social proof
Social proof is the idea that people are more likely to buy or engage with a product or service that has been recommended by their friends or peers. You can use it to your advantage when designing your event website.
There are a few ways this can be done. If you’re running a high-level event for C-Suite executives, you could include short testimonials from previous attendees. Or if you have video footage from last year’s event that shows people having a great time and enjoying the event, try including a link or embedding it in the website.
No matter what your audience or the nature of your event, make sure you include prominent social media share buttons from the event website so your visitors can easily share the page with their own networks.
6. Be considerate with your images
While you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with too many busy images, it’s essential to include a handful of carefully chosen, high-quality images. It goes without saying that you must have permission to use your images. Leveraging your own photos from previous events is always a great option. Or if you have a unique or photogenic venue, you could highlight pictures of the space.
Image file size also matters. If they’re too large, they won’t load quickly enough; if they’re too small, they will look blurry and unprofessional. Aim for a maximum of 1MB for large images and 300KB for smaller images. It’s always best to start with a high-quality picture and resize it, then try to make a low-quality image fit a larger space. You should also try to have some overall consistency in terms of image sizes across the site.
Finally, if you’re layering text across an image, always make sure the text is high-contrast so it’s readable against the image.
7. Create a sense of urgency
It’s marketing and sales 101: always create a sense of urgency. You want your audience to visit your site and feel that they need to register for your event as soon as possible – or risk missing out!
A great way to do this is by including a countdown timer somewhere on the landing page. This can be used to build excitement, grab attention and give the feeling that time is running out – and hopefully, encourage visitors to act quickly.
8. Select the right event technology partner
We’re not going to lie, designing a best-practice event website from scratch isn’t an easy job if you’re not a skilled designer (and who amongst us is?). Even if you follow every tip in this article, web, and graphic design are still highly specialized skills that require years of practice and training.
Thankfully, there are tools out there that can do it for you. When you’re selecting a technology partner to help run your next event, make sure you look for any built-in marketing tools. This should include a drag-and-drop website builder, so you can easily create enticing websites that can be customized for your brand and event with speaker information, session details, agendas, online payment for registration, and more.
How can we help you market and deliver better events?
At EventsAir, we understand the importance of selecting the right event technology partner – someone who can help you deliver exceptional events with innovative tools that support pre-event, during the event, and post-event activities.
We’ve just updated EventsAir with a new suite of event website templates as part of our drag-and-drop website builder, which will help you build your own sites that are on-brand, engaging, fast, and responsive. It’s just one of the brilliant tools we’ve included to help you market your next event.
The best part? Our library of website templates will continue to be expanded and added to over time!
We have one simple mission: to help event planners deliver the WOW in their events with the world’s most powerful event management technology. We’ve delivered some of the world’s biggest events, and we’d love to help you too.
