Making an idea real

Ottawa Events Calendar (OEC) was a new concept: a consolidated calendar of all events happening in Ottawa. Before OEC, there was no centralized spot for everything going on in the city. People had to check out many different websites, each with its own event listings or, in some cases, duplicate events with other sites. There also wasn’t one spot for people to post their own events for all of Ottawa to see.

To bring this new idea to life, OEC needed the right partner for web strategy, branding, design and build.

Scope

First, Aurora created the logo for OEC, which required the development of a complete and thorough brand guidelines document.

Next, Aurora developed a web strategy to determine exactly how the OEC site should operate. This involved many hours of research to see how the events calendars of other cities functioned, noting the pros and cons of each one. From there, Aurora created a sitemap and proposed user journey map.

The site was then wireframed to test the user experience and ensure it could achieve its two main goals: users can easily find events and users can easily list their own events.

Finally, Aurora designed and built the OEC website.

Strategy

OEC had an idea, but no clear direction or strategy on how to achieve that goal. Aurora worked with the OEC team to align on the intent and overall concept of how to achieve this goal. Moreover, Aurora aligned on items like monetization plan, product roadmap, target audience, and the technical requirements needed to carry out those plans. 

Branding

The main challenge in designing the OEC logo was the fact that the full name of the company is quite lengthy. Because it would be difficult to create a logo with that much text, Aurora instead built the logo around an icon that clearly conveys a calendar while also highlighting the fact that the company is based in Ottawa. Similarly, the colour palette needed to highlight both Ottawa and Canada. Ultimately, red and white were selected to create an association between Canada and OEC.

Wireframes, mood boards and UI

In parallel with the branding effort, Aurora was also working on wireframes for the OEC site, along with mood boards to help define the overall look and feel of the site (in line with the brand guidelines).

For the wireframes, Aurora’s approach was to prioritize making it easy and obvious how to view and list events. From a backend dashboard perspective, the UI was focused on making it as easy as possible to post events, particularly for people posting multiple or repeated events.

An extension of the brand guidelines, the mood boards helped define the overall tone of the website. Ultimately, a clean, professional and approachable vibe was chosen — one that bridged the gap between the innovation of Ottawa’s technology sector and the conservative look and feel typically associated with government.

Once those deliverables were approved, Aurora designed all the pages for the new site, as well as the backend dashboard that allows users to list their own events.

CMS build

WordPress was chosen as the content management system (CMS) for the OEC website, with minimal use of external plug-ins.The site needed to meet three major technical requirements:users can search for events in a variety of ways (calendar view, list view, etc.)users can list eventsusers have their own dashboard where they can define presets and additional features, as well as easily manage their eventsWhile each of these posed challenges, in the end, Aurora built a site that is high performing, easy to use and visually appealing.

Outcomes

The launch of the OEC site was promoted with several social media posts, which were shared more than a dozen times within hours of launch. The site continued to attract good levels of organic traffic after the initial launch, despite having no paid ads or a robust search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

You can view the site at ottawaeventscalendar.ca.