Build an Events Gallery in 10 minutes!

November 8, 2023

Let’s Build a Little Something Today

I’m going to show you how to build an events gallery page for your website or for your marketing that will give you a lot of customization and be really easy to update without a lot of technical skill involved. All of these are going to be using free tools.

All right, when we’re finished, just so you know, I’ll let you copy my whole database and you can build right off of what I’ve already created. So to be super easy if you don’t want to have to create your own.

So let’s take a look. First off, we’ve all seen Pinterest and Pinterest is always a really beautiful visualization of things because it’s all based on pictures. We’re going to build this events gallery similar to look like Pinterest and we’re going to start off using a tool called Airtable.

Airtable

Now, I’ve talked a little bit about Airtable before. I’m a huge Airtable fan, and I do a lot of building of really technical things and automations and things like that, but you don’t have to have any real big technical knowledge to use this, and it’s free to get started.

So let’s take a look if you’ve ever used a spreadsheet, you’re gonna love this It’s pretty easy and it’s gonna look very familiar. I’ll let you copy my whole database when we’re done. So don’t worry about the whole setup initially, you’ll get a feel for it rather quickly. I’ve got some columns set up across the top.

You can customize these and change them to however you like, but I’ve got the event name as our primary column, I’ve got a description, you think of this as if you wanna put in details about the event, how much it costs, what time it is, or where it’ll be or what they should bring. You can do that here and you don’t have to use that field, but it’s an option for you.

The Status

I’ve already set up the status as a plan, meaning it’s in the future and then I’ve set up an automation to change it to complete so that it rolls off of your calendar and doesn’t stay on your website. You won’t need to update it every time an event gets completed, it will automatically hide itself off the website.

The Date

And lastly, an estimated date so if you don’t know when you’re going to hold this, but you wanna put the place marker and build it all in, and then set the date later, you can mark it as an Estimated Date. You can choose to show that on the website or not show it If you like.

The Event Link

This will be a link to where they should sign up, or if it’s being held by a third party, you could put any kind of a url, any kind of web link here that could be used for the event.

Then of course, the date, you’re picking this off of the calendar, so super easy you can’t mess that up. If it’s a multiple day event, you can have it be a start and an end date. I’m just going to leave that field empty here for this use. Notes, I’ve just included this simply as if you wanna put some internal notes you may wanna track after an event is complete and say, we don’t wanna do this one anymore, or this was a great one, we need to schedule this in March next year or whatever internal notes you want to have.

Event Photos

Event photos, you can add photos this is simply a drag and drop field. Also, on each one of these records, these are called records, and this whole thing is called a Table – Table One. You can add in the event photo if we wanna hit the space bar, it’ll show me all these fields just in a different format, a scrolling format, and it’ll show me what dates I changed.

The Sign Up

You can put in a contact email if you want. Again, an optional field. The sign up, this is gonna be a button that could be used. So if I put in, let me just put in my own website here, the button will highlight and be available once there’s a link in that field.

All right, so what are we gonna do with all this? Let’s take a look, let’s add one more event here. We’re gonna add in an “ice cream social”, that sounds like fun. And let’s make that be in June and we’re doing the calendar for next year here.

So I’m gonna make that be on the 17th of June, and I already have a photo ready, so let me drag that and drop that right in there. Sorry, I missed it try again, there we go. All right, my ice cream photo is successfully loaded. Okay, and that is all for that event. All right, so I’ve simply added that in.

Viewing Options

Now in Airtable, you have different ways to view your data. This is all going to use the same viewing but I can set up, this is called a grid view. We can also have calendars, galleries, there’s a whole bunch of different things we can do at the bottom here but I’m gonna first show you a separate view and this is one, I only want this to show what’s upcoming.

Here, if I have completed events, like let’s make that completed for a moment, I don’t want that to appear on the website, so that will go away. So Valentine’s Day is no longer listed. Okay, let’s go back, let’s put it back. It hasn’t happened yet, right? But you can set up filters, and I’ve set it on the filter, it has to say planned. So if it has completed or an estimated date it is not going to appear on the website yet.

I’ve taken this view of my data and I am going to look at it on the calendar. So if we look at it on the calendar here, we’re in February, we see Valentine’s Night, Kids’ Paint Night, Glass Fusing. Let’s say we wanna move, the Glass Fusing that date just isn’t gonna work. Let’s move it to the 16th, I can drag and drop, and now the date has been updated.

You can use this calendar and put in on a website or a page or share it with your staff as well. We’re going to do the sharing on the gallery first, but you’ll see the same way the calendar can be shared. All right, so the events gallery, look how beautiful it is with all the pictures that we have of our great looking events.

Share View Option

Now, what do we do with this? How do we let people see it? We’re going to go to the share view option, and this is gonna give me some more options. Do I want the viewers to copy this data? No, I want this to be pretty sturdy data I don’t want anybody who’s looking at it to be able to change anything or copy it.

All right, so I’m going to hit the preview button here next to this little link. This is the link that I would give to anybody I wanna share this calendar with or this events gallery with, and this will be a public link. So, if I wanna include this in a newsletter, I can do that and also, if I wanted to change the name here where it says gallery, I can change the view name right here to be “My Studio Events”. Okay, if I change that, that’s going to change this name right here too. All right, so the events gallery is the focus on what we’re going to do.

Embed To Your Website

If we wanna take this one step further and add it to our website, that’s easy to do as well. Let’s go back to that share button and we also have another option that is Embed this view on your site. So if you click that, you’ll see the HTML code comes up and this is all you need to do, is copy this and paste it into your website.

It’s gonna give you a desktop preview of what this data looks like also mobile, it’s mobile friendly so this shows up great on their cellphone as well. Now I’m gonna turn off these view controls right here. I don’t want my viewers to be able to do too much to this data. I just want it to show up and be pretty they don’t need to adjust it.

All right? So let’s take now my embed information and I’m going to copy that. And I’ve already started, depending on how you do your website, you can do this anyway, but I’m going to go over to the text portion where the HTML code is. My website is in WordPress, but no matter how you do your website, just paste that in. That’s all you need and I’m gonna hit preview and it’s gonna give me a preview of my new webpage that shows this calendar of events.

Resizing

Look how pretty, all right now you don’t really want people to have to click to make this a bigger view so they can see everything. So I’ll show you a little way to do that, super easy.

Go back to that code and you notice where it has height equals let’s make this big. Let’s make it 3000 this is how long it’s going to be on the page. I can preview that (10:28). Look, it got longer it shows everything, how beautiful!

Alright, also notice that once that event link is added, now I can click and my guest if they click that, it should take them to the page to register. Remember, I just used the front page of our website as an example.

Set Up Separate Views

All right, so a do-it-yourselfer events page, you can set up super easy. You can also set up separate views like let’s say that you only wanted to create a view for a school for all events that were appropriate for kids. So you don’t wanna include some of the adult events, you could set up a way to separate those out. You could set up another field, and let’s show you a single status.

I would say the type of event I could add in adults, kids, family. All right, so here I can create this and say, oh, this one’s an adult, this one is adults, this one’s definitely kids – Teacher Appreciation is a family. Okay, I just did it on those couple, I can make a whole separate view, I’ll duplicate that view and let’s make this one an adults only events.

Okay, so when I created that I’ll now change the filter and say, when the type of event is adults, and now we only see that. I could do the same with the gallery I could create a gallery that just shows the adult events.

Conclusion

So the sky is the limit here.

Take this and run with it, and I will include the link below that you can copy this whole base to get yourself started. So you don’t have to start from from scratch, but I want you to send me the link to what you create. And also, if you have any suggestions of other projects you’d like to see us build, let me know. I’m on a build trend here. Thank you and have a great day.

Create An Events Gallery Pyop

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Donna Bordeaux, CPA with PYOPAccounting.com

Creativity and CPAs don’t generally go together. Most people think of CPAs as nerdy accountants who can’t talk with people. Well, it’s time to break that stereotype. Lively, friendly, and knowledgeable can be a part of your relationship with your CPA, as demonstrated by Donna and Chad Bordeaux. They have over 50 years of combined experience as entrepreneurial CPAs. They’ve owned businesses and helped business owners exceed their wildest dreams. They have been able to help businesses earn many times more profit than the average business in the same industry and are passionate about helping industries that help families build great memories.