October 23, 2024
Essential Pages for Every Convention Web Site
by Patrick Delahanty, FanCons.com Administrator
Having looked at literally every convention web site in order to add them to FanCons.com, I've seen a lot of great web sites and plenty of terrible ones. Sometimes a site might be designed well, but missing essential information. Other times, the convention might have a bare-bones design, but they at least have all the information out there.
Mandatory Pages
There are some pages which should always be included:
- A Home Page
Obviously. Can you even have a web site without a home page? In any case, this will likely be the first page people see, so it should always include essential information:- Name of the convention
Pick a spelling, spacing, and capitalization and stick with it. Avoid referring to yourself as "YattaCon", "Yatacon", "Yattakon", and "Yatta Con" in different places. - Dates of the convention
Include the year too so that people know it's up-to-date and not leftover from last year. - Location of the convention
Be specific and give the full hotel name and the town. Make sure to include the full name of the hotel since if you're just saying "Holiday Inn" and there are two Holiday Inns in town, people might go to the wrong one! - Convention description
Tell people what your convention is and don't assume they'll figure it out. It's amazing how many convention web sites don't do this simple thing. All you really need is a paragraph which says something along the lines of, "Founded in 2005, YattaCon is an anime and tabletop gaming convention with a regionally recognized cosplay contest, 25,000 sq ft dealers' room, and an artists' alley featuring over 250 independent artists."
- Name of the convention
- Location / Hotel
This page should list your venue. Again, be specific about the venue name since there might be more than one "Marriott" or "Embassy Suites" in town. Link directly to your hotel's registration page...especially if there's a page which gives attendees a discounted rate. Give people a physical address of your venue to plug into their GPS. If your convention isn't in a hotel, consider providing links to some nearby hotels. Even if your event is only one day, vendors from out of town may be unfamiliar with the area and might appreciate the recommendations. - Registration / Tickets
This might seem obvious, but some conventions actually do not give any information on how much it costs to get in. It's best to give a complete picture of what it's going to cost people to get in the door. List your current online registration rates. If the rates go up at some point, tell people when and what the new rate will be. You'll find they're more likely to sign-up early if they know it's going to save them $10 to do it today versus waiting until next week or next month. Also, be sure to mention what the cost will be at the door, especially if it costs more to pay there. - Guests
If your convention has guests, you'll need a page where you can list them all. Some conventions with many guests might break these out into multiple pages such as actors, comic artists, cosplayers, etc. On the guest page, you'd want to list the guests and provide a photo and short biography of each guest. Some conventions list guests in alphabetical order, some list them in the order they were announced, some will list in order of perceived importance and status, and a few conventions seemingly list guests in completely random order for unknown reasons. At the very least, make sure your list is up-to-date and don't only post announcements on social media. When you start planning for next year's convention, make sure to take down last year's guest list so attendees don't assume the same guests are coming back again. - Contact Information
People will have questions. They might be attendees, guests, or vendors, but they will need a way to contact you or your convention's staff. Provide contact e-mail addresses for various departments (or use a contact form if you don't want to reveal the e-mail addresses to spammers). You might want to set up a Google Voice number for voice mails, but only if you'll actually check the mailbox regularly. A lot of conventions don't have a physical mailing address, but a contact page would be a good place to put it if you do. This page could also be a good place to link to your social media. You might also want to include text telling people to contact the hotel directly if they have questions related to their hotel room. - Policies
Once your convention has grown beyond a simple club meeting with a couple dozen people, you definitely need to set some rules if you haven't already. Publish these rules on your site so that people can't claim you never told them something was against the rules and so you can point to a rule or policy when needed. Among your policies, you should include your current COVID-19 policy (because, yes, it's still out there). Also, a well-written code of conduct or anti-harassment policy is essential and Cosplayer Survivor Support Network has a helpful sample harassment policy and also rates conventions' existing policies.
Recommended Pages
Some additional pages you might find useful:
- News
It's great to have a place where you can post news and announcements about the convention. If your pre-registration has gone live or you want to tell people about the latest guest, this is the place to let people know. Yes, you can also announce on social media, but those posts often get buried. Keep a record of all your announcements on your site with the latest at the top. - Programming
You've undoubtedly planned some programming for your convention. Contests, panels, game rooms, video game tournaments, or other exciting things to keep attendees entertained. Promote them! Let people know what kinds of events you're doing. This is also a good place to post a schedule once it's ready. - About / History
Even if you included a brief summary of your convention on the home page, there's surely a lot more information you can share. If you've been around a while, you might even want to provide stats showing your convention's growth over the years. - Frequently Asked Questions
If you're being asked the same questions over and over, then there's an issue you probably need to address. If people are asking who your guests are, you should add or modify your guests page to state that guests will be listed there upon announcement. If people are asking how much it costs to attend your convention, then the pricing on your registration or ticketing page might not be clear. However, there are often some other questions you'll get that don't really fit in any existing page. In those cases, a FAQ could be a timesaver. You could always start with some general questions (such as "Can I cosplay at the convention?") and then add to it later as other common questions come up. - Volunteering
Nobody can run a convention by themselves. Everyone needs help. Why not create a page on your site by listing open staff or volunteer positions and try to recruit some help? Be sure to not only list a description of the job you're trying to fill and the expected number of hours they'll have to work, but list what benefits staff and/or volunteers at your convention will receive. Common benefits are: free admission, staff shirt, hotel lodging (often shared with other staff members), a certain number of meals, and other benefits like priority access to events or autographs while off-duty.
What Not to Include
Finally, there are some things you want to avoid having on your site:
- Splash Pages
This isn't 2005 anymore. Avoid using a "splash page" that people have to click on before getting to the home page. It delays people from reaching your home page and gives them an opportunity to click away before seeing your content. Splash pages will annoy repeat visitors and can also hurt your convention's search engine ranking. - Ads
Are you running your convention site to advertise your convention or to make money from site visitors? Really, ads are just as out of place on a convention site as they would be on the site for your favorite restaurant. - Temporary Pages
If you have a guest page up and don't have any guests yet, that's fine. Tell people on that page, "Guest announcements are coming soon!" However, if you plan to put up an "About Us" page, wait until it's ready before you start linking to it and don't post it with placeholder text like "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua." Some Wordpress installs default to having pages which say something like "Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!" Never leave that page up! - Attendee Lists
Some conventions, particularly sci-fi and furry cons, used to like to publish lists of everyone who was attending so that people would be able to see if any of their friends were attending. In the last decade or so, such lists have been less welcome because they're handy for stalkers to see if their victims will be there. Some conventions even fought resistance and continued publishing the lists because "That's how we've always done it!" By now, this concept is now viewed as outdated and an invasion of privacy. - Incorrect Guest Information
This might seem obvious, but it actually happens quite often. Usually the convention updates their web site to display next year's dates in the header, but they leave last year's guest list up. Now attendees, particularly those who were unfamiliar with last year's guest list, assume that all these guests will be at the next convention.
Also, if a guest cancels, that should be noted. Do not simply delete the guest from the list. Let people know they have cancelled. (You don't have to say why.) If you simply delete the guest like they were never announced, people may not notice they're no longer listed and be disappointed when they show up expecting a certain guest to be there. There's no shame in having a guest cancel, so go ahead and tell people and list the guest as "cancelled". - The "Comic Convention Website" Wix Template
Using Wix to host your small convention's web site is fine. Plenty of conventions will use it when they're just starting out. However, although you might be tempted and it might seem like a good choice, absolutely do not use the "Comic Convention Website Template" they offer. On its own, it's fine...except that at least half the other conventions hosted by Wix also use that template. Your site will end up looking almost exactly like those. Attendees familiar with that other con might even assume both conventions are run by the same organization...which might be a problem if that other con is not great. Pick a template other cons aren't using...or at least one that's not used by so many!
I hope you find this helpful in planning and organizing your convention's new web site. The web site, if it includes all the necessary information, can be your biggest and best option for marketing your convention.
Patrick Delahanty is the creator of AnimeCons.com which eventually spawned FanCons.com. He is one of the founders of both Anime Boston and Providence Anime Conference. Patrick has attended nearly 200 fan conventions and viewed well over 4,500 convention web sites.
