Customized Calendar Event Listing on the Homepage Posted on March 3rd, 2010 by Joe Lencioni

Calendar events on the Gustavus homepage

Have you ever lost something and became frustrated at how long it took you to find it? Finding information on the web can be a disappointing experience if the information is disorganized or presented poorly. We are always trying to help people find what they are looking for on our website as quickly as possible.

To give our visitors more relevant information, we customize the listing of events that are displayed on the Gustavus homepage for each individual who visits that page. Currently, these customizations are based on our best idea of the visitor’s role in relation to the College and how that connects with the audience field in each calendar item.

In other words, if you visit the homepage and are not logged in, you see events that have an audience of “Public” because these events are most likely going to be interesting to you. If you are logged in, you will also see events that have an audience of “Campus“. If you are logged in and are a faculty member, you will also see events that have an audience of “Faculty“. You get the idea.

In the future, we hope to create a more sophisticated algorithm to show people more relevant events based on other information we know about them (e.g. students who belong to student organizations should see events that are sponsored by their organizations).

If you have any ideas about how we can improve this experience, please let us know!