A website is almost as important an element of planning an event as arranging a Phuket conference venue. Without a central and official hub for information, you’ll find it a lot harder to attract large numbers of attendees. No, a Facebook Page won’t do the job – it’ll give your conference a very unprofessional appearance, which will keep serious attendees away. Fortunately, we’ve got a few ideas to help you plan the best conference website.
Start with an outline
The first thing you need is a skeleton of a plan – a simple list of what information your site should convey. This will generally become your page list, but some pages may be merged or expanded as required. You will certainly need to include the location of your Phuket conference venue, a list of the keynote speakers (including their bios), details of organising committee, registration info, contact details, the schedule, FAQs and a call to action, explaining why people need to attend your event. Once you’ve decided which of these elements require their own page, you can map it out to figure out the menu structure.
Sketch a wireframe
The next step is to turn your map into a basic design. This is called a wireframe because most of your design will consist of empty boxes that you’ll later fill with text and images. Ideally, you want the most important pages at the top and to the left of your design, since that’s how most people navigate web pages. Attention spans on the internet tend to be quite short, so you need to make sure you’re getting to the point quickly and immediately funnelling them towards the registration page or submissions page.
Design clear calls to action
The ‘call to action’ is one of the most important elements of a conference website. It’s a prompt for users to take the action that you want them to take, directing them to the part of the site that you want them to get to. Typically, this will be the registration or submission pages. Having more than one call to action tends to make the message muddled, so it’s best to stick to just one goal. Remember to include a sense of urgency in your call, too, such as including a clear deadline.
Work on SEO
Another new website on the internet is generally going to find itself very low down in the Google search results, unless you apply a bit of search engine optimisation. Since most people stop looking after just the first page of results, you will need to get your site up there if you’re going to get attendees showing up at your Phuket conference venue. It’s best to hire a professional SEO specialist to help you, but there are things you can do yourself, such as deciding on which search terms you want to rank for and ensuring they appear in your site text. You also want to make sure that your URL and homepage title match and are relevant to the subject.