Saturday, 2 December 2023

The Craft Calendar explained

The craft calendar is a great way of searching for content by date. When a member lists an event, it automatically appears here. The calendar pages group all event types together in one place, you can look for a specific day or use one of the saved searches like, this weekend or next weekend, these are always at the top of the page and are scrollable. When we first put together the calendar for the site it was quite a simple affair, you could just search one day at a time.

The calendar is flexible, so can be used on multiple screen sizes. In addition, the information in the calendar is SEO friendly.

The calendar has a few extras too. We have key dates throughout the year like, bank holidays, national days, religious days and other special days. You may also see information about famous British artists and crafts people born on the day you are looking at.

We like to start the working week on a Monday but in the craft community the weekends are when almost all craft fairs take place, often extended by bank holiday weekends. Courses however, tend to be at different times, so as not to impact on selling days.

Understanding the calendar

At the top and left on larger screen is the calendar itself, it shows a month at a time with weekends highlighted, along with the dates selected. Old dates (dates in the past) are greyed out. You can use the dropdown to view the key, so you understand what the colours mean.

As a UK company promoting UK events, we use the standard Gregorian calendar. 365 days in a year plus an extra day in leap years. This calendar is based around the sun, to help keep seasons the same or similar each year. It has been around since 1582, so we think it is here to stay. This was a Christian calendar that made a very small change to stop the Easter celebrations moving further away from the equinox. The changes were made by Pope Gregory VIII (the eighth), a lot of countries adopted this new calendar immediately, but none Catholic countries followed later with the Greeks only adopting it in 1923. The calendar was based on the earier calendars from the Roman empire.

Things to come

We are interested in new ways of searching and the types of search people may want to make in this structured page. We are looking to add weekly, and monthly searches.