Vivabit, the company behind the popular @media conference for web design professionals, has launched Event Wax, a product they personally use to organize and book attendees to their events. It’s a free web-based service that allows event organizers to publish a hosted event website, accept payments online and manage attendee registration. Whether you are running a conference, workshop, or a TechCrunch party, Event Wax is designed to help.

Event Wax was originally developed earlier this year as a way for Vivabit to manage their @media 2006 conference. Based on their experience running @media in 2005, they knew exactly what they were needing. They describe on their website, “The initial method of keeping track of delegates with a rudimentary spreadsheet, manual invoicing, and notes scribbled all over the place, simply wasn’t going to cut the mustard.” They have since developed, refined and improved their prototype application and found it to be a success at this years @media conference with 800 delegates, as noted by Dan Webb of Vivabit on his personal blog.

I’m not sure why, but I have always had high interest in this field of event planning - especially large scale events. I can’t even imagine the amount of planning and organization that has to be made when running them. But, in light of testing Event Wax, I created a (fake) Solution Watch Meetup. I’m going to pass it to my fellow workers at Parallel inviting them to register for the meetup at my favorite restaurant, Olive Garden, where we usually eat once a week anyways!

You start off by creating your Event Wax account and picking an address to access it at (you.eventwax.com). Once set, login and create your first event (in my case, Solution Watch Meetup). Event Wax asks you to specify the events capacity, where it’s located, when it will be held, and how you are going to accept payment from attendees (if not free). If you do plan on charging for your event, you can either set up your payement gateway in Account Settings first, or just set payment options later. Currently, PayPal is the only supported gateway for payments, but other gateways, including Authorize.Net and Secpay, are coming soon.

After creating your event, head to the Tickets area where you can manage different types of tickets you plan to offer for your event. Each ticket can be assigned: the amount you have available, pricing, date available, and a color label (to help organize all attendees). So for example, one could create separate tickets at separate prices for bloggers, press, and so on. Then, when someone goes to register for the event, they will be presented with each ticket and can specify how many of each they need. You can also set additional charges by percent or fixed rate for each attendee if needed (example use: tax).

Now it’s time to customize your event website. You have two options for this: 1. Use Event Wax’s hosted website and registration form; 2. Create your own website and send your visitors to the hosted registration form. I have went with option one where I was able to change my content, using Textile formatting, and theme the design using CSS. However, you cannot change the templates structure - only the CSS and basic formatting. But if you are good with CSS, you can make a presentable design. The Event Wax website also says more functionality to come including comments, attendee profiles, and other interactive options. Here’s my Solution Watch Meetup event site powered by Event Wax.

As people register to your event from your Event Wax website, the Attendees section will fill up and each attendee will receive an email confirming their booking. The Attendees section nicely presents all bookings with sorting options, instant search filter, and color coding (color of the their ticket). You can also select an individual booking and add some notes to it if needed. What’s also nice is when selecting one or more attendees from the list, you can select to send an email to them all and export them to a spreadsheet or XML file. I could not find any importing options or manual entry to add attendees though.

Although I don’t know much about planning and organizing events, I felt that Event Wax did a great job with attendee registration and management. It was extremely simple to get a site up and attendees coming in. And being able to instantly assign a PayPal account to it was a big plus, although I’d much rather use a gateway like Authorize.net (which is coming soon). I also found the help documentation to be nicely implemented (uses Ajax). However, there were some areas that I felt were lacking in Event Wax. For example, you can view all attendees and charge them for the tickets, but you cannot get a total amount earned from the tickets or totals of the additional charges. Also, I would have liked manual entry or importing options in case I needed them.

Event Wax also has some noteworthy features coming soon including a feature-rich API, Upcoming.com integration, more payment options, and interactive websites including commenting and attendee profiles.