When designing web sites, it often makes more sense to purchase a program that has already been created and tested than to try to re-invent the wheel. This month what we needed was a flexible, customizable calendar. After researching the many calendar programs out there, we decided upon Hunt Calendars (www.huntcal.com) a web-based calendar service that can be fully customized to meet the needs of just about any individual or organization.

The good news for people who don't care about integrating a calendar into a web design, but just want the calendar (along with some very cool features) is that it's free! That's right. Hunt Calendars offers free personal and group calendars, even multiple calendars, that can be created easily and without any special training. The interface is so user friendly and flexible that it's simple to manipulate while meeting the needs of most organizations.

The good news for developers, however, is that for a small fee the calendars can be fully customized to integrate seamlessly within an existing web site design. The following are some of the customizable calendar features:

Custom header/footer - The Hunt Calendars logo, banner and footer can be easily replaced with your own logo, graphics and other content. All calendars that belong to your group will share the customizations. Three levels of customization are offered for varying levels of expertise: basic, advanced and Webmaster.

Customized categories - The calendar administrator (or developer) can create a list of color-coded event categories. When an event is posted, a category can be selected from the list of categories to specify the event type. Events can also be searched by category.

No advertising - Advertising banners or pop-up/pop-under windows are not displayed for customized calendars.

In addition to these features, customized calendars support all the features of the free service, including:

Access restriction - The group administrator can create group member IDs and passwords to restrict access to the calendars. Permissions can be established that allow anyone, only group members, or only the calendar administrator, to add, change or delete events. It's often practical to create a calendar that only a specified few can update, but anyone can view.

E-mail reminders - One or two e-mail reminders can be sent minutes, hours or days before an event. The e-mail message can be sent as HTML or plain text.

Multiple views - Calendar events can be viewed as a list or grid. The list style displays events in a list to the right of a small calendar table. The grid style displays events in a traditional wall calendar grid. Events can be viewed by the day, week or month. An advanced view option allows the viewer to view events for an arbitrary date range. A printer friendly view removes editing controls and graphics. If you don't want normal viewers to see editing controls, such as Add/Delete and Event buttons, a "read-only" view can be used. Several calendar attributes can be set dynamically using URL parameters. For example, adding "?bg=w&cs=b&pe=h" to the end of the URL will produce a calendar with a white background and a blue color scheme with past events hidden.

Event search - The advanced view option offers the ability to conduct a keyword search of events within a given date range.

HTML markup in events - Event descriptions can include HTML markup. This allows you to add bold, italics, colors, images, etc. Complete URLs included in the event text then become hot links.

Recurring events - Several options make it possible to describe almost any type of recurring event, such as biweekly paydays, quarterly results, or biannual celebrations.

Color schemes - Choose from six color schemes (blue, white, green, purple, red, tan) and two background colors (black or white).

24-hour time notation - Event times can be displayed using military/24-hour time notation. The default is the standard 12-hour notation.

Event copy - When adding an event, you have the option of adding the event to another calendar. This is useful if you want to add an event to your personal calendar and a group calendar simultaneously. You can also specify a different event description for the other calendar.

If this sounds like the tool you've been searching for, please go ahead and visit www.huntcal.com Several sample calendars are available to demonstrate the capabilities of the system and you'll find all the information you'll need. This one's a real winner!