I designed it all at Downtown Bentonville Inc for 6 years. It wasquite the challenge! Every year was a challenge to keep things fresh and new and still feel like DBI. I always kept them ahead of the game in the world of design and if you lined us up next to other (bigger) business in the field you can clearly see that we're different and tell our story in a way that visually set us above the others. That's really important, because their name confuses a lot of people and still makes people think they are the city. So I wanted to do what I could in my field to make us stand apart.
As I had to tell everyone..
"We're not the city."
We love the city and they work really hard along side us, but we are a small nonprofit creating events in downtown to bring us all together. We seriously need support cause theres no tax dollars that go to DBI. They rely on sponsors and donation. Ok now that you have some perspective let's talk about the site.
It's a fun site for a small non-profit that does events in Downtown Bentonville. We're a small 4 person team that puts on all the First Fridays, Farmers Markets, Christmas Parade, Lighting of the Square and more. We can do a whole lot for such a small team and, as far as the design goes, it's only because I use the right tools! Let me tell you all my tricks!
We needed the whole towns events in one place. So it had to be easier for them to add them and even more importantly easy for me to find them all and add them. Of course in the end if you create a community anything - it will ultimately fall on your shoulders. So now we have bentonvilleevents.com - one massive community calendar. By using Event Calendar App, Webflow and Paperform everyone can submit events easily with very little maintenance on DBI's end. I can add events to it just by clicking that I'm interested on Facebook and the event is pulled straight to a google calendar thats connected to Event Calendar App. Paperfrom is a simple form editor that can do a lot, it's the easiest. I created this form alert me of new places.
I was hesitant to have so many links in the chain, but it's been running well for two years now! I've tried "Event Calendar" on a Wordpress site and that's a nightmare. Don't even go there. There's always an easy solution if you just keep looking. This option took me two years of digging and trying things before I found it. So be patient if you must.
I wanted to list every business in Downtown with directions, images, and information about them. The Explore page organizes it all into categories making it easy to find all the restaurants, parks, art galleries and more. It was quite the task. I took 95% of the images you see as well, so I got lots of practice under my belt now.
Applications are a big part of it too so we signed up with Paperform to build kick butt forms that everyone can manage and they tie into the website seamlessly.
They have a ton of events and each one needs pretty much a one page website. I put them all into one dynamic page that shows and hides tons of different info based on which event is selected. It looks very clean and runs fast!
As if that's not cool enough, I was also able to create an app that uses at the data in the Explore collections, allowing the app to be updated when the website is. The website is very mobile responsive, but an app feels different, so I just created it from scratch to look and feel like one. Really it's just four pages of the website that are only linked to each other, but you'd never know. Download it to check it out.
(on any device)
