Introducing Learning: A Central Calendar For Industry Webinars And Webcasts

March 23, 2020 by Dave Haynes

After a pitched battle with a plug-in for WordPress, I kinda sorta mostly have an events calendar running here under the banner of LEARNING.

You will find a link to LEARNING on the main navigation menu beneath the SIXTEEN:NINE logo, and a widget on the RH sidebar of pages, that lists events by date.

It is a free service intended to centralize webinars and webcasts that have grown VERY important, as many to most digital signage and Digital Out Of Home businesses are unable to travel to clients, trade shows or conferences. Even their showrooms are off-limits. 

Many companies do a good job with social media and other tools to try to raise awareness and activity for their online demos, explainers and educational sessions. But a tweet or Linkedin post is easily missed or forgotten, and then we move on. This LEARNING page – basically a calendar of webcasts and webinars – is intended as a way to centralize things and list them by date.

There is a self-serve option to the WordPress toolset that will theoretically allow vendors to directly post their own listings, but after three hours of trying today to get that part to fully work, I gave up. At least for now.

What I have pulled together is not overly pretty, but I started four hours ago, and this looks pretty OK.

So … if you want to submit a webinar, to be listed, I need in a TEXT file – not a Word doc or web page link – a TEXT file attached and emailed to me with the following:

• Date of webinar
• Time start and stop, based on US Eastern (NYC) time
• Headline title of session
• Brief summary – four to five paragraphs max (trust me when I assure you only your mother will read more than that)
• URL for the registration page – create a custom one if you want to track how many registrations come from this service
• Attached company logo or event image in JPG or PNG, at 400px minimum width

The ad banner in the middle of the event listing is something I will hopefully be able to remove, but for now, it’s there. Sorry. The instructions say something about Taxonomy and “careful with this” – so I chickened out.

If you just send me stuff any way you feel like, it’s not going up. These event posts will take me time to do, so help me out here, please. I need to do these in five minutes, not 25.

E-MAIL  – dave AT sixteen-nine.net