Easily add an interactive online calendar to your website - By: Ko Fai Godfrey Ko

Many websites feature an online event calendar as an essential tool for their regular return visitors.

An interactive calendar on website is very useful, in particularly for websites with a large group of regular and repeat visitors, such as a sports club, an education institution, or an online directory which require a calendar of events for listing of shows, movies, ticket sales for community luncheon, venue, conference and exhibitions, etc.

If you are an experienced HTML or Javascript programmer, you could create a calendar of events page manually. However an interactive and regularly updated online calendar on your website could always be helpful and save you lots of work.

For example, you might have a special team meeting on the first Monday of every month. If you create your calendar page manually, you would need to edit the web page and enter each event by hand, and mark down each date for the next few months, which is very time consuming and tedious task.

On the other hand, most website calendar software would allow you to simply enter a rule to define a repeated event. You simply need to define a repeat event once, and have it automatically displayed correctly on your website calendar for all future months.

Your web site visitors can scroll through the calendar to see events in the coming months or even years, and if additional information are entered, they can click on a date to see the full details.

If you have visitors check your website often for new events, functions, parties, conference, meetings, shows, concerts, etc, then adding a calendar to your website will certainly give a very useful tool to your visitors for them to find date specific information easier and quicker.

An online event calendar can be built in various ways using different tools. Many websites install event calendar script developed using PHP, or PERL programming language.

The advantage of these script based calendar is that they are usually open source code which can be modified by experienced web programmers for seamless integration with an existing website. And once installed, website administrator can update calendar information thru a control panel.

However PHP or Perl script coding is not easy to learn for everyone. Most business web site owners are not programmers, and the cost would become too high to hire a web programmer just to install a website calendar.

That's why flash calendar component has became more and more popular in recent years. A flash calendar often provides a high-tech look and feel, with smooth graphics and animations. And inserting a flash calendar to a website is much easier than modifying a script based calendar.

User can easily add, edit or remove calendar entries without any programming --- as flash calendar usually comes with a XML file for user to update calendar data by using a simple text editor without any scripting.

There are also software for generating website calendar easily, which usually comes with many pre-designed calendar skins and a WYSIWYG editor. Users can easily define their events, select a calendar template, set calendar title and headers, and then generate the HTML code automatically for copy and paste to his web page.

An interactive calendar on website is very useful, in particularly for websites with a large group of regular and repeat visitors. There are few ways you can create and embed an online calendar to your own website.

Ko Fai Godfrey, website software since 1996. Developed software including a website calendar , website builder, interactive map builder, photo gallery and web video player.