Website Improvement

Follow UND's website improvements.

It’s Calendar Prime Time

We reviewed last year’s calendar use and found some interesting results.

Calendar Traffic Spiked the First Week of School

Each UND calendar event typically receive about 6,000 pageviews per week but spiked to almost 15,0000 pageviews the first week of the fall 2018 semester.

Our students are engaged the first week of school and want to find UND events. It’s critical to get your fall events in the calendar before the start of the semester.

Events are Best Showcased on Your Website

Users are not visiting the actual UND calendar at calendar.UND.edu. Instead they are engaging with event embeds across the website. Last year, the calendar website had 9,487 pageviews whereas custom calendar embeds across the site had 319,419 pageviews.

This underscores the need for event embeds across our site. The embeds allow you to manage your event in the actual calendar and then extract and distributed events on your site. Here are some different styles of embeds that are auto-fed directly from the calendar:

Complete a web support request form if you’d like assistance in generating an event embed for your site. You need to have at least five events in the next 100 days for an embed. If you don’t, list the event on your site and link to the calendar for more information.

Photos Draw Attention

Event listings with a unique photo get more eyes on them than those without. We refreshed the calendar photo library to provide more options. Additionally, please consider these tips:

  1. Use an actual image; not an event flyer. Event details will appear in the calendar listing so there is no need to repeat details in the image.
  2. If you are using an embed, it is critical to use a unique image for every event. Otherwise, you will have the same image appear over and over on your website.

The Calendar Comes First for Events

Last year, 1,500 events were posted to the calendar. We need to continue to grow calendar use in order to showcase UND’s vibrant community. For this reason, all event hosts should continue to input and manage their own events in the calendar. This is a required first step before any additional event promotion is done.