Case study brief: Developing a scalable events calendar
Newark & Sherwood District Council required a website to showcase upcoming events and activities across the region. The What’s On calendar needed to be user-friendly for residents and visitors, with robust search and filter features, and be simplistic for the Council to maintain.
After a longstanding working relationship with our team, providing accessibility audit testing and building the Council’s main website, HeX won the contract to lead on this dynamic and scalable web development project, built with Terminalfour.
Effortless event management made this case study stand out
To avoid administrative burden, the Council needed a maintainable solution to streamline event submissions for external contributors.
Combining our in-depth Terminalfour CMS knowledge, with the ability to craft a custom-made accessible PHP webhook, our experts integrated an automated workflow. In turn, removing the need for organisers having access to the CMS or the Council having to manually enter event submissions – reducing workload, risk, and ensuring consistency and data quality across the platform.
Accessible web design and development action
- Accessible web development
- Project management and accessibility consultancy
- Accessibility tested to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA
- Upskilling content editor training
Building a data-driven workflow
Being Terminalfour’s official preferred contractor, we knew the power that this CMS and its PHP Event Calendar could provide to Newark & Sherwood’s What’s On calendar.
To address the challenges within the project scope, surrounding external submissions needing manual entry or back-end access to the platform, we built a dedicated event form through Jotform. Jotform is an AI-powered online form builder and workflow automation platform, which can fully integrate directly into the CMS.
This powerful tool guides event organisers in a structured way through the submission process, capturing all required information, including event:
- Dates and times
- Locations
- Imagery
- Accessibility details
- Descriptions of activities
The form was designed to mirror the structure used by Terminalfour’s Events Calendar, keeping the two tightly aligned. Overall, this ensures form contributions are consistently submitted, ready for automated processing, and are easily managed by the Council.
HeX Developers created a custom webhook to efficiently pull data from Jotform to the CMS upon completion of an event submission. Behind the scenes this augmentation process takes the received data – checking for accuracy, validating entries, and processing uploaded imagery to meet the site’s display requirements. The event data is then converted into a structured, compatible format for Terminalfour’s Content Sync functionality. Following this, the events are automatically transferred into the CMS, making them available for review and publication. This process reduces the risk of errors through manual entry, saves time for Council employees, and ensures all events follow the same structure and rules, regardless of who submitted it.
Creating a user-centred platform with robust search and filter features
The website itself has been designed with striking call-to-actions, driving engagement and guiding visitors through the activities taking place across the district.
A key requirement for the platform was empowering residents of Newark & Sherwood to be able to easily find What’s On in the area. To enable flexible discovery of event listings, we categorised activities and integrated a free-text search feature and robust filters, giving users the option to break down content by:
- Location
- Date
- Event type
To ensure all users in the district can easily access and interact with the platform, we built a user-centred site. Not only has the platform been developed to meet with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA standards, but ongoing user testing throughout the process took place with an array of devices and assistive technologies.
Furthermore, a final stage of our development process saw varying stakeholders throughout Newark & Sherwood and wider teams, such as Nottingham City Council, perform user acceptance testing. This testing took place on both form submissions and event listings to ensure the finished site works for a broad range of user needs.
Empowering residents of Newark & Sherwood to easily see What’s On in the district
The Council now has a streamlined, reliable workflow that efficiently enhances the user journey through activities in the area and enables organisers to easily submit events.
The website’s architecture and custom scripts has significantly reduced the need for manual site maintenance, whilst also creating a consistent structure for event listings.
The Council has the confidence to govern processes and retain full control over final approval and visibility of events through upskilling training on the back-end of the website.
Due to the site conforming to web standards and undergoing a series of user-testing, everyone in Newark & Sherwood can now seamlessly search and attend What’s On across the district no matter what device or software they may use.
More case studies about accessible web development
Palace Theatre Newark
The Palace Theatre identified that their previous website was difficult for their community to use. This led them to requiring a redesign of their site to be in-keeping with the friendly and helpful service they provide.
Newark & Sherwood District Council
Newark & Sherwood District Council required a complete overhaul of their main website. This was essential to meet government accessibility standards, which is a necessity for all public sector organisations.