Create an Event Booking Website with WordPre…

Imagine this: You’re planning to host a series of events or offer appointment-based services, and you know that having a smooth online booking system is essential. You check around for someone to build it for you, but the quotes are sky-high, and none of them quite fit what you’re looking for. That’s exactly what happened when my wife wanted to set up a booking and payment website. She tried to find someone who could make it happen at a reasonable cost, but it just wasn’t coming together.

That’s when she turned to me. As someone who’s spent years working with WordPress, I knew there had to be a better way—something that didn’t involve breaking the bank. I dug into the world of plugins and found exactly what we needed: a versatile, easy-to-use booking plugin. It’s open-source, just like WordPress itself, which means you can customize it to your heart’s content. Plus, it’s free to get started, with an affordable upgrade option if you want to add online payments.

In this course, I’m going to walk you through how to set up that very same booking system. I’ll start by showing you the final product we’ll build together, so you know exactly what to expect. Then, we’ll break it down step-by-step, from installation to customization, making sure you feel confident every step of the way.

Even if you’re new to WordPress, you’ll find my approach practical and straightforward. I’ll focus on the essential features to get you up and running, but I’ll also include a reference section for the more advanced features that I didn’t use.

By the end of this course, you’ll not only have the skills to build a booking system for your own business or project—you’ll also have the know-how to create one for clients, opening up a whole new opportunity for you. Let’s get started.

What's inside

Learning objectives

Automate an online booking or appointment system online
Create a website that can take bookings online using wordpress

Create a landing page for the booking system
Take payments online

Automate an online booking or appointment system online
Create a website that can take bookings online using wordpress
Create a landing page for the booking system
Take payments online

Syllabus

Introduction

An introduction to the instructor and the course.

With WordPress installed, let's clear out the stuff that we don't need.

This video looks at the Privacy Policy and how you can get help with creating your own. This is one of the most important pages on your site.

Let's install the plugin that allows us to create our booking/appointment calendars.

Let's get the theme set up and create a child theme.

When we installed the booking plugin, it created a demo calendar for us to look at. Let's go through some of the settings and see how that calendar was created.

I wanted to have a quick look at the addons available in the free version, plus show you the rich set of addons for the paid version of this plugin.,

There are some useful demos you can have a look at, and I highly recommend you go through these.

Let's have a look at the site we will build in this course.

Let's create a calendar for our Santa's Grotto and have a look at it.

For the Santa's Grotto booking form to work for us, we need to create a number of different services.

With our Grotto only open on certain days of the week, we need to tell the plugin which days and times to accept bookings.

Each calendar you create has a few useful settings that can be changed on the General settings screen. This video shows you what those settings are and how to access them.

The booking plugin will send out emails to the admins and customers. This video shows how to configure those emails.

The booking plugin can add extra security against spammers by including a captcha feature on the bookings page. You can customize this or remove it completely.

As the admin, you can have reports emailed to you about the bookings that are coming in.

The Calendar's Addons screen can provide useful information on how to use addons you have enabled.

For our site, we need a second calendar to book breakfast with Santa. This video goes through the setup of that.

An About Us page is important to give you visitors important information about your product or service, and you as an individual or company. This video shows how I've used one on the booking site.

The site header is shown on every page on the site except the homepage. This video shows how I created it.

The site footer includes important copyright info, as well as a link to one of the most important documents on the site. This video shows how that was set up.

To tie in all of the pages of the site, we need to create a homepage. That's what we'll do in this video and to help everyone that wants to stick with Gutenberg, we'll use Gutenberg. In the video that follows, we'll re-create the page with Elementor.

In this video, we'll create the homepage but by using Elementor instead of Gutenberg.

To add payments to your booking website, you need the premium version of the plugin. That's what this lecture is about.

The commercial version of the plugin has a lot of useful addons that extend the functionality of the plugin. These include addons for taking payments through your site.

In this video I'll show you how to set up a Paypal Sandbox account so you can test payments.

This video shows how you can integrate Paypal payments into your site using an addon that you get access to with the paid version of the booking plugin.

The Auto Cancel addon is a great time-saver meaning we don't need to take action to free up appointments from those people that abandon their shopping cart.

This video shows a few reports that we set up using another addon.

Let's look at the system we are going to implement with WooCommerce, showing how WooCommerce makes the product pages better, adds a shopping cart and checkout, and makes credit card payments more intuitive.

To integrate the WooCommerce plugin, we need to install WooCommerce and an "Addon".

Let's add the Santa's Grotto as a product in WooCommerce.

Let's add the Breakfast with Santa as a product in WooCommerce.

This video shows how to setup the Paypal Payments plugin to accept Paypal payments and credit cards.

And finally, pulling everything together.

This video looks at the Rename, Publish and Booking Orders screens that we can use to manage our calendar bookings.

The Edit button takes you into the form editor and is arguably the most important screen in the plugiun.

This video explores the schedule and add booking buttons.

You can block appointments if you need to, meaning they won't be available to book.

This video looks at the stats, clone and delete buttons. We'll also recap on how to use the shortcode.

The plugin has its own general settings so this video goes through them.

Addons allow you to turn features on or off as needed. This video looks at some of the addons included in the paid version that can improve your experience.

These addons enable SMS and chat features into your booking system.

This video goes through some of the other addons available to paid users of the booking plugin.

This video goes quickly through the available addons related to payment gateways.

This bonus lecture has information about resources used in this course.

Career center