Spend A Minute On Your Station’s Website!

Busy today? We know. You’re running a radio station. Planning out the music you’ll play. Lining up all of those commercials. Making sure the station sounds the best it can.

But here’s something you should put on your to-do list: spend a few minutes on your radio station’s website.

We know. You’re busy. But your station’s website is your calling card. It’s your public face. And we’ll guess that 99% of the people who want to hear to your station are going to arrive at your website before they hit that “Play Now” button.

Judging from some of your websites — and we’re not pointing fingers — you could use a few minutes under the hood of your home on the web.

Yes, it’s one more job, and maybe it isn’t in your primary skillset, but making certain that your station’s website looks good and works properly is a one-hundred on a scale from one to ten.

Not sure if your station’s website looks good and works properly? Take a moment to visit the websites of some of your over-the-air competitors. How does yours compare?

Too often when our staff visits NAdB member websites, we find over-crowded pages jammed with random photographs; poorly-written text; jaggy and amateurish logos; and far too much clutter — or, even worse, nothing but an “under construction” page!

A few pro tips:

• Clean up that front page! You don’t have to have everything there.
• Stay in your lane! If you aren’t a professional web developer, don’t choose the fanciest design or WordPress theme. Basic isn’t bad!
• Have lots of photos from an event? Don’t jam them all on the front page. Choose one great one, and link it to a blog post deeper in your website. That gets your visitors to explore!
• Not crazy about your logo? Go to Fiverr.com and spend as little as $5 to get yourself a sweet new logo that you’ll be proud of — just search “logo design” on Fiverr and browse for ideas.
• Make sure your audio player works! If you use Shoutcast, make sure your audio server is set to “public.” (Don’t know how? Get support from Shoutcast.com.) If you’re on another system, such as Live365 or Radionomy, make sure that you have working links to your audio stream — not just logos that go nowhere.

Again, having a website that works may not be your first priority, but it should at the very least be a priority!