We are so excited to present to you (our loyals fans and readers) a newly designed PDX Kids Calendar! We have worked long and hard to bring you a much improved resource for finding family friendly events and happenings in the Portland area!

Let’s take a little tour …

NAVIGATION

Along the top you will find our new navigation menu, starting with our events calendar where you will find a new, easily navigatable way to find things to do (more on this later). Next you’ll see Where to go, What to do, What a deal and Who we are. These drop down menus will guide you to pages and posts containing all the information you have found useful over the last year on our site, including reviews, guides, resources, and much more. Take a look … hopefully you’ll find what you need quickly and easily. You can also look for information by categories (as you can see along the left side of the page there’s a drop down for that). Coming soon there will be an archive post listing as well as a tag cloud —  just more fun and exciting ways to find information.

SEARCHING EVENTS AND POSTS

We, of course, have an ever-trusty “search” functionality. One thing to note quickly about both the categories AND search functionalities – they only apply to posts and pages – NOT EVENTS.

This is an important distinction. The events calendar is actually a completely separate part of the site that’s not integrated with searching and tagging. However, you can easily find information about events from the Events Calendar page itself!  There are quite a few new features on the events calendar that we hope will be useful to all you busy readers.  First, there are way more events!  Instead of being limited to only seeing events for the coming week, you can now look ahead a bit.  Right now we have entered many many events for the coming month of August – and will continue to add more events regularly, so be sure to check back often.  Also, we are expanding our reach a bit to beyond Portland.  For now, we’re keeping the non-Portland events pretty narrow, concentrating mainly on events that we find travel-worthy.

Don’t care to look for events beyond Portland?  No problem!  You have a couple options.  You can choose to set a filter limiting your searches only to Portland.  You do this on the main events page by clicking on that third icon on the top under the calendar.  Note for this function, every box you check is an “OR” – so if you filter by clicking on Portland and Toddler, you will get all events that are either in Portland or that are appropriate for toddlers.

You can also limit the activities you’re searching for with the search function.  You can limit by neighborhood, type of activity, age, and so forth.   For the search function, every box you check is an “AND” – so if you want to find events that are appropriate for preschoolers in SE Portland that involve music, check all those boxes and you’ll get back what you’re looking for.

Finally, we encourage you to use the “Submit Event” function to tell us about your upcoming events.

WORK IN PROGRESS

A couple of things to note that we are working on:

1. We know that the drop down menus are getting stuck when using internet explorer to view the site. We are working on this issue – but in the meantime encourage you to view our site in another browser such as Firefox or Chrome.

2. Page jumps and anchors – due to time constraints, we haven’t had time to get all the page anchors and jumps fixed – so you may have to do some extra scrolling on pages like new parent resources, library storytimes and indoor gyms and pools. Again something we’re working on and we apologize for the added inconvenience.

NEW AND EXCITING FEATURES

There are many lovely and wonderful features to the site … here are just a few of our favorites:

• We have a most adorable logo and tagline – thanks to a good friend for designing it. We will soon have some cute merchandise that you can purchase to show your PDX Kids Calendar love!
• When readers (that’s you) comment on a post, they will be required to enter their email address, but it will only show to us – not the whole universe! You do not need to create a username or login or anything, you just need to enter a valid email address. Now we’ll be able to notify winners more easily for giveaways AND your privacy is much more protected!
• The events calendar … we just love it. We know it will take some getting used to but we hope you will all love it too!

We really can’t wait to hear what you think about the new site. We are putting up a FAQ page to answer any and all questions that pop up. You can email us (faq(at)pdxkidscalendar.com) or just leave a comment here if there’s something you like, love or can’t stand and we’ll try to address it to the best of our abilities.

COMING SOON

In the pipeline we have some exciting things coming up. We will be starting our FAN GIVEAWAY on Monday August 1st … details about that forthcoming in the next couple days. We will of course continue to do reviews of events and happenings in the area – and bring you amazing giveaways.

THANK YOU

We thank you … each and every one of you out there who reads and supports our little endeavor. We’re just two Portland mamas working out tails off to bring you the best dang resource in Portland for finding things to do with your families!

So when you’re looking for something to do  – rain or shine - we’ve got you covered!