I'm thinking about starting an events website for my town. Is it a good idea?
My town, in suburban NYC, has a lot of events, sports, auditions, galleries, etc. The local papers don't have events sections. The way people find out about events is by going to individual websites (hike at the preserve, crafts at the library, meetings at town fall), signs around town, ticketing websites, and Facebook.
I'm thinking, if I maintained a comprehensive events website, it would be to the greater good by helping these events be more successful, build community (maybe more than just parents would go to the elementary school holiday show; everyone would know about town meetings), and help people step away from Facebook for these needs.
I'm thinking mostly I would manually enter everything, but eventually some information such as the school sports calendars, could be directly linked/scraped from the source.
What kind of database situation would work best for this use? I don't anticipate needing photos, just text. Robust searching would be key. I'd love people to be able to find, for example, kids' events in the morning on Saturday, Dec 22, or which restaurants have live music on Thursdays.
And it would be nice if later I could add on features like sending out newsletters to people who signed up. Other future updates could allow people to bookmark or follow an event, or link it to their calendar. |