The Pine Forest Art Centre has provided Summer courses in art and craft to thousands of Irish Children since the early nineteen seventies. The Centre is located in the beautiful Dublin Mountains, a perfect setting for gathering materials for art and craft activities and for inspiring creativity in children of all ages.

Each Summer the Pine Forest Art Centre accepts registrations from over 1,500 children for its season that year. The courses take place between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm each week day, and the children arrive at the Summer School on private buses provided by the Centre. Booking has traditionally been handled using paper based forms, but the Pine Forest Art Centre realised in 2003 that the addition of on-line booking and information could speed up and simplify the process for their customers, as well as save them time and money.

The Pine Forest Art Centre contracted Eventznet to develop and host a web site for the the Summer School. With the assistance of an Empower Grant from Venturepoint, the Dunlaoghaire/Rathdown County Enterprise Board, the Pine Forest was also able to include mailing list functionality and an on-line booking system.

"Our web site had to reflect the core ethos of our branding proposition" says Katie Long, general manager of the Pine Forest. "Ease of use and maximum compatibility with a number of browsers is essential for us, as many of our customers are contacting us from home based PC's. It is also essential that our web site illustrates the types of activities the children would take part in during the Summer courses. Another key factor for us was to ensure that parents can see immediately that the children can be outside, getting fresh air and enjoying the countryside."

Eventznet and the Pine Forest Art Centre worked closely together on the design and content of the web site. They also worked closely together to specify the booking options, again taking into account both the Pine Forest Art Centre's customers, and the existing Pine Forest booking systems.

The final result included a PDF version of the booking form for those customers who still like a paper based form; a booking enquiry form which provides those parents who wish to check availability of places on a course before completing a booking form; and an on-line booking form which can be printed and posted to the Pine Forest, whilst a provisional booking is made through the system.

"We know very very little about the internet," says Katie Long, "but we do know that more and more of our customers expect us to make use of it! We needed a solution that we could use easily, without having to change the way we currently do things, but that would complement it. Eventznet and their booking engine has saved us a lot of time and money already, since we can just point our customers to our web site to download the booking form instead of having to post it out to them. We expect that next year we will really reap the benefits of the system, when we use the e-mail addresses we are collecting in our mailing list system to reduce the costly mail-shot we normally use."