The story of hongkongevents.com

Ugli is proud to announce the launch of hongkongevents.com.

At its core, the site is an events promotion site, aimed at the Hong Kong market now with the possibility of international expansion in the future. Most of the events in the site are input by HKE management, but crucially event promoters can register and submit events themselves which promotes a sense of community (and reduces admin expenses).

Events in the site feature time, date and venue information, descriptive text and images, and an integrated Google Map to help people find them. The text is presented so it attracts search engine traffic for event-specific search terms, as well as terms specific to the site as a whole. Special events can be featured as "Cindiddy's Pick" - using popular local fashion blogger Cindiddy to draw attention to noteworthy events.

We built the site using Drupal, which allowed us to develop the site quickly and to experiment with - and occasionally discard - features without committing large amounts of project resources to their development.

Advanced content management functions

'Out of the box' (if you'll pardon the expression) Drupal has a controlled and powerful content management stratagem, dynamic and highly configurable, which allows site owners to conveniently maintain their product. We tweaked it to allow rich text editing using a WYSIWYG text editor.

Role-based permission system

We needed to create sets of permissions (known to Drupal users as roles) for the site owner, the site admin (that's us at Ugli), event promoters, and the general viewing public. Drupal's versatile permissioning system makes this a simple and painless task.

Advertising management

The site generates revenue by carrying advertisements, which can be added and scheduled using the Content Management System. The system also tracks impressions and clicks on the ads, from which can be derived the click-through rate (CTR), the universal measure of the success of an ad.

Modular framework, contributed modules

Drupal's key benefit is its modular nature, meaning that any of thousands of contributed modules can be plugged in and activated. For hongkongevents.com we used among others the GMaps module (to allow tight integration with Google Maps: the system can "geocode" street addresses, automatically locating them on the map), the Google Analytics module (providing very detailed traffic statistics and reports), and the ubiquitous Views (which allows content items, in this case the events, to be displayed in sortable, filterable lists, as seen on the home page of hongkongevents.com).

Search Engine Optimisation

We built the site so that the search engines can easily index its textual content, both for the site as a whole (for searches like "hong kong events") and for specific events (for searches like "tears for fears hong kong"). Even so soon after launch, this strategy has enjoyed demonstrable success - the site is already listed on the first page of results for "hong kong events".

Hong Kong Events was a very enjoyable site to build and one which I'm sure will succeed. We wish it the best of luck!