Featured Calendar: Golden Oldies Cat Rescue

Cats are curious creatures. They can be playful and understated at the same time and that’s what Golden Oldies Cat Rescue was able to capture in their online calendar.

You can see that playfulness in the way colors are used throughout the calendar. Gold is tough for design, but this calendar nails it by using it as an accent for actionable items. Notice how gold is used sparingly and only when something needs attention, like links, buttons and navigation. We’d be feline if we said this wasn’t an excellent example a clean, well-designed calendar.

Showing the Golden Oldies calendar which defaults to List View. There are two events in the view.

The calendar defaults to List view.

Less is more

Oh, and there’s something else worth noting. The Golden Oldies Cat Rescue calendar does exactly what it needs to do — nothing more, nothing less.

Sure, The Events Calendar has a full suite of add-ons that offer premium features to the calendar. And sure, we’d love for you to purchase all of them. But what this calendar does well is pair itself with the right features for what it needs to do. There’s no need for visitors to submit events to the calendar. Tickets are irrelevant. The calendar employs a combination of The Events Calendar, Events Calendar Pro and Filter Bar to create an effective and pleasant user experience. They can create recurring events, offer different calendar views, and let visitors discover events. It’s the purr-fect blend of features and functionality. (Sorry, can’t help myself.)

Showing the calendar header. The top shows the page title against a large background image of a cat. Below it is the event search form followed by a set of options for filtering events by cost, venue, time and city.

The Golden Oldies calendar header.

We’re at the tail end (ah, again!) of this post but the big takeaway is exercising restraint when it comes to a calendar. It’s tempting to go all out and make the biggest, beefiest calendar that does all the things. But paws-ing for a moment to focus on what your visitors need from your calendar and clawing at the small details is what makes it feel like a natural part of your website. That’s the cat’s meow.

Plugins in use

The Golden Oldies Cat Rescue site uses the following plugins for its calendar:

  • The Events Calendar – This is our free plugin that’s used as foundation for the entire calendar.
  • Events Calendar Pro – This paid add-on unlocks a ton of premium features in The Events Calendar, from handy widgets to slick calendar views, but this site is primarily using it for the recurring events feature.
  • Filter Bar – This paid add-on displays a set of options above the calendar that let visitors filter events by a number of attributes, including cost, time of day, distance, categories and tags, among others. We generally recommend it for calendars that are packed with events but you can see how Golden Oldies Cat Rescue uses only the filters it needs for a better user experience.