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SITE OF THE WEEK

There's just too darn much to do around here. Every summer and fall weekend is crammed with festivals, concerts, road races, street fairs, boating events, garden tours, lectures, gallery shows, live theater and sporting events.

VISIT the NH HAPPENINGS web site

It wasn't always like this. Only a few decades ago New Hampshire tourists had to root around for a good yard sale, church social or ham and bean supper. People were satisfied with the beaches, lakes and mountains, mixed in with the occasional state fair. Now the state's cultural resources have become as appealing as its natural resources – and part of the state’s largest income source.

So you'd think some clever entrepreneur could pull together a one-stop events calendar listing everything going on in the state. The Web is the ideal spot for such a tool. Groups with events could submit them to a massive database that we could all access online for free, searching by town, by date or by topic. How hard could that be?

Very hard, it turns out, very hard indeed.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

The best online, statewide event calendar I’ve seen to date is the independent site NHHappenings.com. NHevents.com, part of NH.com which is owned by the Nashua Telegraph is my runner up.

NH Happenings wins because it has the most data in the best database. Click on the binoculars on the homepage and see. Visitors have a world of choices. You can search the whole state or any of the color-coded regions. You can search by date from one week to six months in advance (all the old data disappears as it should). Finally, and this is the brilliant part, you can narrow your search further from among two dozen subcategories, picking as many subs as you wish, combining them with your date and geographical focus. So, for example, I can look for golf tournaments, museums and auctions in just the Monadnock Region in the first two weeks of September – and it works! Now that’s a muscular database and it makes the competition look flabby by comparison.

Creating the site was just one of those spontaneous things, according to NH Happenings owner Brian Lombard.

"I woke up one morning a few years ago," Lombard explains, "and said it would be nice to do something on the web. I looked around for events online and said -- there has to be a better way of doing this."

At the time Lombard was working in construction management and he had as many as eight employees working on the NH Happenings concept, the navigation and the graphics. Leading Edge Media, Inc. (www.lemi.com) of Manchester created the back end that is fully "customer-controlled" according to the latest Web jargon.

"Our goal was to provide the best information on NH recreation, events and hospitality without overloading the viewer with tons of advertising. We all hate it on the radio, in magazines, and on TV. The trick is to find that balance between ads and content," he says.

Today Lombard has a new job marketing the up-and-coming railroad systems for the state of NH, but he keeps his hand in on evenings and weekends, updating NH Happenings. One full time staff member works from a Manchester office, gathering content and selling advertising. Finding the right kind of advertising that appeals to buyers and does not overtax readers is endlessly tricky. Part of the answer, many sites have discovered, is to offer basic listings free, then offer paid upgrades – photos, more detail, clickable links, higher placement on searches.

THE UP SHOT

Here's why it's so hard to do. First, despite what you might think, small organizations are not very good at public relations – even when it’s free. There are zillions of NH social clubs, churches, historic groups and sports teams whose combined event listings would make a superb database. But getting them all to report their data, even using the miracle of email, is like pulling teeth. Believe me, I’ve tried. Most event vendors list their own activities on their own sites – very handy – but very time consuming for the visitor looking for lots of choices fast.

Second, the audience is too diverse. Not everybody goes to the same sources for info. I hate to use this word, but there are a "plethora" of freebie print calendars across the state that list events. There are the regional newspapers that do it best on a day-to-day basis. There’s radio and TV, direct mail and more. Unlike Canada, that has its centralized government-sponsored tourism act together, no statewide agency commands control here. Our state tourism site, VisitNH.gov, has a databased events calendar, but currently one can search either by region or date or by keyword. But we need to search ALL those categories simultaneously. A day search works great, but when I searched there for Seacoast events, I got events from last January at the top of the list.

Third is the money problem, which is the basic problem of the Web itself. Who pays? Not the viewer certainly, And it’s not easy to charge the lister. Banner and tile advertising is still a hard sell; despite the proven sales performance of the Web, advertisers remain cautious. Another income source, for the winner of the best database, is to resell the data to other sites in NH that could offer their own events listings using data from NH Happenings, for example. But that means keeping the data stream flowing.

Forth, tracking every event, even in a state the size of NH, is a task of Herculean dimensions. There is no way to avoid shoveling tons of content in and out daily, since a good events calendar is nothing but content. My guess is that two or three people, keyboarding data at 40 hours a week, could barely keep up even with what's happening in the Granite State. And each day, as the calendar advances, all the previous day’s work is deleted.

Even in the Seacoast, where there are arguably more cultural events than any other region of the state, no one has solved the Events Calendar problem. The dominant local newspapers publish truly superb weekly calendars, but online the info isn’t databased. The chambers list their own member events to the exclusion of others. The towns are totally territorial. The most successful events page I’ve ever seen are the Movie Listings on PortsmouthNH.com. It’s a miracle of diverse accurate info for people who want to see films within a short drive of the Seacoast. But it’s just one small part of the huge EVENTS category.

On the Web, I like to support the guy who does the job best. There’s no need for all of us to duplicate each other’s efforts, and right now my money is on NHHappenings.com. It’s the most carefully thought out events engine so far. I’ve just added their link to my site. What if everyone did the same?