Featured Calendar: Medina Bookshop
Running an independent bookstore these days is not for the faint-hearted. With big retailers selling books online for cheap, maintaining an independent bookstore certainly offers challenges. That’s why it’s essential to have a website to showcase your business, which is precisely what our WordPress calendar example, Medina Bookshop, does. They not only sell their books in person, but you can also purchase them online and attend in-store events if you live in the area.
Medina Bookshop, located on the Isle of Wight in England, utilizes the features of our calendaring, ticketing, and filtering plugins to bring their events to the forefront for their community.
We’ll show you how they make it happen below, so let’s get started!
The homepage
When you first visit the website, you are met with a header that gives you all of the information you need to get started with the bookshop’s website. For some visitors, they’ll want to order books online and for others, they’ll be interested in upcoming events. All of these resources and more can be found in the navigation bar at the top of the homepage.
Scroll down and you’ll see all of their upcoming events at the bookstore, which they’ve conveniently displayed with a customized widget.
Continue further down the homepage to see their recent blog posts, learn about some of their featured authors, and learn more about what books might be available at the shop.
The main calendar page
Now that you’ve seen all that Medina Bookshop has to offer, let’s take a look at how they use The Events Calendar suite of products to showcase their upcoming events. To start, on the main calendar page, they use The Events Calendar and Filter Bar to both display their events and give users the ability to filter events by venue, category, day, and month. By allowing site visitors to utilize this functionality, they can easily locate the events that they’re looking for without having to sift through all of the upcoming events.
Directly below the Filter Bar, you’ll see a customized list of upcoming events. Although we don’t know exactly how they created this wonderful and informative event listing, what we do know is that our plugins are highly customizable. We’ve got lots of customization resources available so that you can personalize your calendar to your liking.
Keep scrolling and you’ll see the classic Month View version of our calendar.
The event page
Visit any one of the single event pages and you’ll see a page filled with links, descriptions, and all of the event details you need to prepare for the event. Medina Bookshop included a sidebar to break down all of the information, along with a map so that you know exactly how to find them.
“It works really well, very simple and straightforward, new listings take just a few minutes to put up.” – Paul Armfield, Events Manager of Medina Bookshop’s website
Also important on the page is the ability to sell tickets with Event Tickets and Event Tickets Plus. Event Tickets is our free plugin that comes standard with our ecommerce solution, Tickets Commerce. Medina Bookshop uses Tickets Commerce to sell tickets to their events through PayPal, but you can also use it to sell tickets through Stripe.
To add even more features like advanced widgets and custom registration forms, and to waive additional fees with Stripe, we recommend upgrading to Event Tickets Plus.
With a clear-cut interface and simple checkout process, accepting payments with our free plugin has never been easier.
Even more WordPress calendar examples!
As you can see, Medina Bookshop created a customized, informative website to bring their independent bookstore into the virtual world. And you can too! We’ve got lots of examples of different types of websites using our plugins, so if you enjoyed this post, head over to our Showcase to see even more examples of our plugins in the wild.