A couple of years ago I had a client who wanted to incorporate an event calendar onto their site and I came up with a rather complicated solution to handle the problem. The events were updated using javascript and a document that needed to be uploaded to the server via ftp each time an update was made. My client wasn’t interested in learning to make the updates and I practically had to relearn the process each time an update was made because I didn’t use it that often. No more! Now I’m very pleased with the ease of use of Google’s Calendar application. http://calendar.google.com
Using Google Calendar, you can customize the view (day, week, month), size and border using their wizard. They create the code for you and you cut and paste it into your site. Then you or the client can use Google’s user friendly interface to update the events making them public or private. You don’t need to know html to make calendar updates and you can add administrators and set privacy options as you see fit. The calendars even show up in Google search results, so it’s much like posting images or video on a 3rd party site and embedding it into your content - it gives visitors another way to find you on the internet!
I’ve implimented the Google Calendar into two sites so far and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it again if the need arises. http://njvaccinationchoice.org and http://hennatattoos4u.com both use this solution.
