As soon as I was on the site I immediately felt ‘at home’. Although I haven’t used the site a lot, my experiences so far have been good and there’s something nice about coming back to a place where you had a good time last time you were there.

Flowery language you may think, but I’m a strong believer (as some of you may know) of things and places having the potential to make me smile and feel good and websites are certainly no exception.

The events on NileGuide Events Map are quickly accessed from another tab that sits logically alongside tabs such as ‘restaurants’ and ‘nightlife’. Initially I hadn’t signed in and I was presented with an interactive map and various search criteria.

Interestingly, one of the event ‘types’ was ‘Dangerous Festivals’. It immediately caught my attention and an event I am attending in September falls into this category and is descried on NileGuide as: ‘…event is not for the feeble-hearted. More than 30,000 participants purchase a ticket. …Understandably, tempers are short, and foul language and nudity are very much a part of the experience.’ Can you guess where I’m going? You can be sure that I will blog about it!

Anyway, back to NileGuide. I decided to focus on Singapore as a reference point to get a feel for what I could find. The list of events was impressive. It covered a wide-range of things including exhibitions, sports events and religious festivals. I’d logged in by this point and so was able to add them to ‘my list’ using the excellent core functionality of the NileGuide site where one can create one’s own trip around choices of hotel, restaurants and places to visit.

I could sort the list of events by start date and proximity. I liked the ‘proximity sort’ option allowing me to sort with respect to a place of my choosing – my hotel for example or the airport. This made very good sense. There were also some search filters including criteria like ‘kids friendly’, ‘outdoors’ and ‘active’ etc. These too make sense but I look forward to the day when the web and its websites and applications know me as an individual a little better and I don’t have to filter and make choices based on others’ segmentation and differentiation however well informed and intentioned. (This is only around the next corner I think)

A click on a specific event brings up all the details you might need – all contact details, a brief description and a map location. It’s also shown on the page’s own map as are all the events when looking at the whole list so proximity is easy to gauge.

This is all integrated, as I said, with the already great website and adds depth, context and richness to the whole experience of planning a trip and working out what to do when there.

As I was viewing Singapore events, it occurred to me that I could use this aspect of the website simply as a local ‘what’s on’ guide for me. I would certainly recommend the folks at NileGuide to see how they could re-skin their existing content for this purpose.

 Featured image credit (Three burning christmas sparklers.): Ockra/iStock