First, let me mention the obvious:

OMG that’s one LONG Homepage!

Cool, that’s out of my system now. TEDx events are almost entirely volunteer endeavor and so we did as much as we could without a budget. TED already has a very recognizable logo for their brand, and they’ve defined their color pallet which all TEDx organizations are required to follow (but seldom do.)

We had some very specific requirements Pre-Show:

1. Event registration and payment capture for attendees.
2. Lead capture for interested prospects with a Mailchimp automation system to sell them into the event.
3. Showcase for each speaker to tease their upcoming TEDx Talk.
4. Showcase for Sponsors and Volunteers.
5. Application system needed to be built for the purpose of screening potential speakers. This application system had to allow for the upload of documents and video files in a way that remained organized so that volunteers could review and curate.

And then the site had a Post-Show mission as well:

1. Speaker pages needed to be updated after the show to include the embedded YouTube video of their TEDx Talk with social share.
2. Pre-Show lead capture had to be changed over to a new sequence to capture leads for next year’s show.
3. Volunteer intake forms needed to be updated.

We built the event registration process using Gravity Forms to handle the logistics and front-end display duties, and we plugged Stripe into the back end as a merchant gateway. Stripe collects the money from the buyer and deposits it into the client bank account. Meanwhile, Gravity Forms is also integrated with Mailchimp so that each event registrant is subscribed to a customer list there which triggers an automated Mailchimp Workflow causing a welcome packet to be emailed out immediately while placing the customer into a newsletter queue.

We’re big fans of Gravity Forms, and I’ve written a bit about the benefits of using Gravity Forms here on the blog.

In the case of TEDxSantaBarbara, using Gravity Forms was an especially appropriate choice as it creates a wonderfully well-organized  library of entries that you can access later or export to a .CSV file later. Gravity Forms will also forward all of that entry-data into almost any CMS system, though we didn’t go there on this project.

• Hosting: TEDxSantaBarbara.com is hosted on WPEngine Manage WordPress Hosting, which we feel is just about the best thing out there right now for secure and reliable WordPress hosting.

Additional Disclosure:

PXLPod Web Strategy’s Christopher Michael (yeah, that’s me. Hi. I write all of the copy here on the site..) is currently CTO of TEDxSantaBarbara.com. He (I) built this site over the course of a couple of weekends and maintain it as part of the SecurePod Maintenance Plan that Mark Sylvester and Kymberlee Weil have enrolled in to protect and cover their websites.