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Have you ever registered for an event or webinar and then forgot about it? If your small business hosts events or webinars, adding an "Add to Calendar" function to your event calendar can help remind your customers to attend.
iCalendar files use the .ics extension and are supported by Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Entourage, and many others… When a user clicks a hyperlink on your website associated with a .ics file, it triggers the option to add that event to their calendar.
If you are using a template system for your website, check your calendar tools. There may be an iCalendar function built it. If so, all you need to do is active the function.
If you are maintaining your own website files, you can create .ics files within your website editor or text editor, or with our iCalendar code generator. Upload the files to your web hosting account and hyperlink to them from your calendar details pages.
If you are a web programmer, you can use whichever programming language you work with to generate iCalendar files directly from your calendar function and write them to the website hosting account. Either set the coding to generate a file each time an event is added to or updated from the calendar, or, on the fly when a web user wants to use the iCalendar function.
iCalendar files look like this:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20130202T006000
DTEND:20130317T120000
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[eventemailaddressgoeshere]
LOCATION:[locationgoeshere]
URL:[websiteurlgoeshere]
DESCRIPTION:[description goes here]
SUMMARY:[event name goes]
CLASS:PUBLIC
PRIORITY:3
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
You can also add an alarm with:
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT30M
ACTION:DISPLAY
END:VALARM
When you are confident in your .ics abilities and are ready to add more features, take a look at http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/
Ready to create your iCalendar .ics files? Use our online iCalendar code generator...
Posted on May 8, 2013 | Permalink | Join email list
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