| Google Calendars - a free and easy calendar solution for your website |  |
Kia Ora, developing a fully functioning calendar system has always been deemed as a lot of work, and in most cases this kind of development is out of the budget for the client. We have recently discovered Google Calendars and have been adding them to some of our clients websites as a cheap and easy method of doing this for them. All you need is a Gmail account for your website (if you do not already have one - and also you can forward the email address to your current email address) and from there you can easily set up a public calendar, which you can then embed anywhere on your website.
We have been playing around with Google Calendars and are currently implementing quite a complex version on a site we are developing. Some of the limitations we have found so far are minor but could (most likely will) be modified in future.
- Scaling the calendars down in size causes the calendar events to become unreadable
- Modifying the CSS (i.e. the colours) of the calendars is currently not possible - except the main background colour of the calendar
- Links to more information are not customizable
Overall the Google Calendars are a great solution for small clubs that hold events, or any company for that matter. Once your calendar is made public anyone can subscribe to your calendar which will add it to their personal Google Calendar - so they will also receive event reminders in their inbox. You can also add any other public calendar to your websites calendar - so for example you can add New Zealand public holidays. Another great feature is that you can set up re-occurring events, then go through the calendar and delete the instances of that event that wont happen - for example an event that occurs on a public holiday.
So if you're interested in adding a calendar to your website let us know and we can run you through it. Have you got any cool Google Calendar tricks and tips, or public calendars I can subscribe to? Let us know! This is a cool tool we will be using a bit in the future. Currently the only event on my calendar is "Eat a sandwich day" which occurred this week. Yum.
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