How to Tag Seasonal Events
(Commencement Ceremony Example)
If you have content that repeats on a seasonal beat, and your visitors want to plan ahead, you want to look at using seasonal tags to guide your visitors through the planning year. You may need additional tags based on audience as well.
Here’s an example of how to tag your events seasonally using the Commencement Ceremony.
How Tags Work
The Commencement website contains three tabs with calendar widgets pointing to the three seasons of commencement at Tarleton. They are labeled for visitors as August, December and May, however, on the back-end (via LiveWhale) we use the more common internal terms of “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall”.
As the events are added into LiveWhale, they automatically feed into their appropriate calendar widget on the Commencement website. For example, a May commencement ceremony event will appear under the May tab if the event includes the specific tags “Ceremony” and “Spring.” A December commencement ceremony event will appear under the December tab if the event includes the specific tags “Ceremony” and “Fall.”
The following list of tags applicable to commencement will help explain when the best use of each of the tags to make the feeds on the webpages show only relevant information to the schedules for each semester:
| Ceremony | Use this tag only on commencement ceremony events that have a specified date and time, not for tentative date ranges. Example: You would use this tag for the event “Commencement Ceremony for College of Science & Technology”. You would not use this tag for “Commencement Ceremonies (May 12-13)” |
|---|---|
| Commencement | Use this tag for all calendar events relating to commencement ceremonies. This includes application deadlines, tentative ceremony dates and specified ceremony dates. Example: You would use this tag for “Commencement Ceremonies (May 12-13)” |
| Graduation | This tag should be used in the same context as the Commencement tag. Having both tags on all commencement events helps users with searchability, allowing students to search for the keywords graduation or commencement and receive the same results. |
| Doctoral | Use this tag for ceremonies that will include graduates receiving Doctoral degrees. |
| Fall / Spring / Summer | Use these tags to indicate which semester the given event corresponds with. Fall for December commencement, Spring for May commencement and Summer for August commencement. |
| Graduate | Use this tag for ceremonies that include graduates from the College of Graduate Studies. |
| Undergraduate | Use this tag for ceremonies that include graduates receiving Bachelor’s degrees. |
What about when there are no events ready for a season? You can make or request from Web Strategy a default message appear on your calendar widget when no events have been added. The Commencement Ceremony widgets describe the potential dates for the graduations to occur before updated information is available.
Potential Usage
We encourage you to add tags to groups of events that allow us to create custom calendar widgets for you that display these specific events. We can even create calendar views much like the ones for calendar groups.
If an event is extensive, with numerous events occurring for various audiences and activities, please contact Web Strategy about creating a new calendar group that can handle these events specifically.
For example, Langdon Review is both an annual event (Langdon Review Weekend) and a publication. Therefore, different audiences will view events specific to their needs:
- writers and artists might need submission dates and deadlines
- a committee might need review dates and deadlines before adding content to the publication
- Langdon Review Weekend attendees might need activity dates/times as well as registration deadlines (e.g. Early, Regular, Late)