The Lotus Moments Event Center, located in Des Moines, Iowa is located in a historic building in downtown. The Event Center is very spacious as it has room for three hundred guests to enjoy a sit down meal. Equipped with full catering kitchen and dance floor, the Lotus Moments Event Center is idea for parties ranging from weddings and reunions to any special occasion. We recently had the pleasure of revamping the Lotus Moments Event Center website.

One of the most important features that we added to the Lotus Moments website was an integrated Facebook feed. Adding this social network tool was very important because Lotus Moments already used their Facebook page as an avenue to advertise and spread the word about public events such as workshops, craft fairs, and fundraisers. The Facebook feed on the Lotus Moments website automatically updates when the Facebook page is edited. This was a fantastic feature because on their old site, Lotus Moments had to manually maintain both the Facebook page and an independent announcement blurb area. Gone are the days of double work! Now Lotus Moments can post on Facebook and the new website automatically updates by itself.

Another feature of note on the Lotus Moments Event Center website is the Calendar. Staff at Lotus Moments can input event details within the backend of the website so that they can keep track of specific timing and details of scheduled events. Regular users will just see that the event center is reserved, but the staff can see the specific nature of the event. This is very helpful for a site visitor that is trying to quickly figure out when the Lotus Moments Event Center is available.

Finally, the Event Planning guide is a custom informational feature that we have built for Lotus Moments. The Event Planning Guide has 4 steps:

1) Inform: The first element in the Event Planning Guide is a purely informational page. Here we have listed relevant forms and information regarding policies and booking events. One thing of note is that we have made the Lotus Moments Event Planning Guidelines an interactive accordion on this section of the site. This is particularly useful for site visitors to quickly learn about venue requirements and polices.

 2) Date: Here we have the calendar describing the dates available for booking potential events with Lotus Moments.

 3) Decorate: The decorate page has specific information regarding the items and options that are available for decorating the Lotus Moments Event Center. In addition, we have the custom Floor Plan tool that allows users to drop and drag tables to form a layout. This floor plan tool was built in Flash and was an important feature that Lotus Moments wanted to preserve when we rebuilt their website as this element was on their old website. Also on the decorate section of the Event planning guide is information about the professional printed products that Lotus Moments offers as well. Lotus Moments prints a wide range of products including invitations, invitations, cards, labels, party favors, etc. It was important to include a section to include this expanded service especially as printed products go hand in hand with special events. 

4) Contact: As there are many details to be worked out when planning a special event, the final section within the Event Planning tool is a section for users to contact Lotus Moments.

Lotus Moments Event Center also has several galleries to help visitors to see the venue and get ideas about decorations and setup possibilities. This is very important because visitors to the website will definitely want to see what Lotus Moments has to offer. Since Lotus Moments has quite a lot of flexibility and specialty as an event center it was very important to help demonstrate and incorporate all the facets of Lotus Moments as a company. With the completion of this website, we struck the right balance between adding new features while preserving old ones to make the website meet the needs of Lotus Moments Event Center.