Many of the most popular pages on our sites, like Top Picks, Big On Sales and Free Events, are what we call "user lists" - user pages tied to internal email addresses (eg - toppicks@dothebay.com). Every city should push out new and updated user lists on a regular basis. These include seasonal lists like "Halloween" or "New Year's Eve" and evergreen lists like "Top Events", "Just Announced" and "Free." Here's how to build an awesome user list. We'll use 'Top Events' as our example. Creating The List User The first step is to register the list user on your site. To do so:
Optimizing Your Page Title & Description For SEO Stellar titles and URLs can contribute greatly to the organic search ranking of a user list. When titling your list, we recommend starting by asking the following question: What would I search if I had the question that this page is built to answer? It's also always best to include the name of your city in the page's title if possible, and to omit superfluous words. We generally recommend including your whole page's title in the permalink, with words separated by hyphens: eg, do416.to/best-concerts-and-events-in-toronto Adding Events To The List User There are three ways to add events to list users - and you'll likely want to leverage all three for most of your lists. 1. Logging in with the user on the front end of your site You'll want to make sure that your top events user includes all of the best events happening in your city. To maintain the utmost value for this user, you won't want to add events to it just for the sake of adding them -- so there is no minimum number of events that the user should have. Similarly, there's no maximum number of events to have for a single day, as long as all the events featured on the list are outstanding. To make sure you include all the best events happening in the near future (the next 2 or so weeks), you ought to have a repeating Asana task set up to remind you to log in with this user twice per week and add events via the front end of your site. To add events via the front end, go to http://doXYZ.com/users/sign_in and sign in with the user's email and password. Then, scan through each of your upcoming days' events, starting with 'today', and up-vote any ones that you want to add to the user. Up-voting an event will automatically add it to the user's profile page. Conversely, you can navigate to the user's profile at any time while you're logged in and hit the checked box to un-add the event. 2. Voting on events from Radmin Whenever an awesome event comes through the pending queue or duplicates queue, it's best to add it to any of your relevant lists right when you see it. To do so:
 You can vote on events in Radmin via the pending queue, duplicates queue, Radmin -> Events -> Approved, Radmin -> Events -> Search, and more. Pro tip: Since event popularity is so closely coupled with artist records, there may be awesome non-music events that would make great 'Top Events' hanging out in the bottom of your event listings. One great way to quickly check through each day's events and see if any events (A) could use a slight popularity boost so they're more visible and (B) could be good fodder for user lists, email, or social highlights is to click the calendar icon in the top left of Radmin and select a given day to see all events sorted in order of popularity:  ... then navigate to the last page of events to see the ones with the lowest popularity. Who knows, maybe you'll find a diamond in the rough!  3. 'Auto Voting' On Events All users who have their 'Auto Vote' box checked in Radmin will automatically add all of the events from both artists they follow and venues they follow to their profiles. In the case of your Top Events user, you may always want to add all of a certain artist's or venue's shows. An example of such a venue would be a waterfront park who throws 4 awesome shows per year (and nothing more). To follow an artist or venue on your site:
 Our auto vote workers run once a night to vote on events from all the artists and venues that users have followed. If you create a list and want your user's artists' events to populate immediately, please hit up DoStuff and we will manually run them. Also note that our system has no memory of events which have been added and then removed from your user list. If your user is following a band that pulls in an unwanted show, the only way to permanently remove that show is to remove that show and then either stop following that band for that user or turn off the auto voting feature for that user. Giveaways Page Your giveaways page is like a normal user list in every way except for the fact that any event with an active giveaway will be added to the page immediately - and that event will only be removed once the start date of the respective event passes. If you'd like to manually remove an event from the giveaways page, you can do so by logging in with the user on the front end and un-voting on the event, in the same way you would for a normal list user. RSVPs Page Please note that your 'All RSVPs' page, accessible at doXYZ.com/events/rsvp, is not a user list. All events with RSVPs are automatically added to this page - so it requires no manual upkeep (making it all the better for featuring). FAQ: Why does my user list have two of the same event? You may notice the occasional duplicate event on a user list. The reason for this is, because there are a variety of different ways to add events to a user list, it is possible to accidentally add the same event twice (or more) times to a single user. To fix this:
When To Use Articles vs. User Lists: We recommend user lists for collections of events and articles for collections of places. The exceptions to this rule are:
Please reach out to Support if you're ever unsure which format of editorial page to use. |
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