At this point, you hopefully have walked your way through creating a reasonably attractive website using WordPress and a related theme.  You’ve added some content pages and might have even figured out how to do a few other things on your own.  Good job!

Now we want to think about adding additional functionality to your site.  How about a Calendar?

If you work with a church or ministry organization, you are shooting yourself in the foot by not having a calendar online.  And many, many other organizations and businesses could make wonderful use of an online calendar for marketing purposes.  If you run a store of some sort, posting monthly bargains or special sales events on your website calendar could really boost the relevance of your site.  If you run a daycare, childcare facility or school posting your school schedule online is a wonderful gift that you can give to parents who loose things (speaking as one such parent). So, consider your site.  If you’ve got something date-related worth sharing add it to your website as well.

There are a number of calendar plug ins available and if you go to your Dashboard plug in section and type calendar into the search box, you will quickly see that WordPress has no shortage of nifty calendar plug ins for your site…but my suggestion is that if you’ve not yet taken a look at Google calendars, start there.

http://calendar.google.com/

I suggest the Google Calendar for 2 reasons.  1st it’s easy to use and add to your site and I’ve got a commitment here to helping you make this as easy for yourself as possible. 2nd is the fact that it’s wildly popular and helps your marketing efforts.  If you are using a very popular calendar program, the odds of someone stumbling across your calendar are good, even before they know you have a website.  And if it’s a thing of interest they have the ability to subscribe to it and keep up with things that you’ve added to your calendar.  So, that one time customer who happened to see your “Garmin 960″ Blowout weekend on your calendar might subscribe so as not to forget to drop into your store.  But once they’ve subscribed you have a bit of an audience for future advertisements.

It’s quite simple to add a google calendar to your website.  First, you gotta get one!

The link above will take you to the Google calendar site and if you don’t already have a google login (where have you been) you’ll need to register.  It’s easy and free so no worries.

Once you have registered and signed in to the site, you will see a calendar.  Somewhere on that pages, you should see your email address and a drop down arrow.  That will lead to your calendar settings.

You want to give your calendar a name (ideally similar to your website), description and location.  The location is important to help connect you to those who are close by.  There is a second tab called sharing where you can set your calendar to public.  You need to do that!

Somewhere in the midst of all those things (on the location and description page) you will find a little section of code called “Embed”.  Just copy all the code in the box and paste it on your Calendar page created on your website.  Oops, I didn’t tell you to create a calendar page, but you had to know that was coming.  ;p

You need a blank page called calendar.  And you will paste the Google Embed code into it using the HTML view.  And TaDa!!!!  It’s done. You just put a calendar on your website.

You can (and probably should) get  a little fancier with it. WordPress has a number of Google calendar plugins that add options to how and where you can post your calendar.  You might not want to embed the entire calendar into a full page…you might just want a list of upcoming events in the sidebar.  The right plug in will create a widget for you to drag to your sidebar.  But that’s all extra and a bit beyond the basics.  Poke around and see how it works.

Step One -Get a Domain Name And Web Space
Step Two – Consider Your Content
Step Three- Set Up your Website
Step Four- Consider your Design
Step Five- Turn a Blog into a Site
Step Six – Add A Calendar
Step Seven – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Extra Credit- Adding A Podcast