During the 3 months that I worked on a brand new Radio Station website for Youths Choice Website. When given the brief was originally given to me I spoke to the head of media about making this project something I was already working on, as I already do a lot of in and out of school projects. We decided that it would be a great idea to move forward doing the Youths Choice website for my FMP.
Throughout the first month, I engaged with my client (that was the Youths Choice management). I created the site using a combination of WordPress and custom coding as I have been involved with the making of both Radio websites as well as other sites for individuals or businesses. It involved a lot of complex features such as playout integration and a way to see who is presenting live. These (in the back end) have also been made to respond to JSON requests for future expandability, for example, if they wanted a mobile app that ‘app’ would be able to just request the now playing data and who is live data directly from the website rather than whoever builds it having to create brand new infrastructure for it. This will save both time and money further down the line.
In the first 2 weeks, I focused mainly on my Research. I engage a lot with radio websites already, and this is not the first time I’ve made a website for a brand so I didn’t need to learn all my skills from scratch. During this time spent my time looking at other radio station websites, looking particularly at the ‘codes and conventions of what makes a radio website exciting and engaging for the station’s audience. It’s important that I got to know about this as without knowing what competitors were doing and why they were doing it it would make the new station’s website fall way behind with features and ease of use. Ideally, I would have liked to speak to the companies that have produced these websites to get a bit more insight into how and why they do things, however with this project’s time restrictions I was unable to arrange these meetings.
The next few weeks were spent completing my planning. I spent this week meeting with both the client and a focus group. This focus group was made up of the station’s listeners and some of their presenters and on-air staff. The listeners were keen to get involved with the focus group after an email was sent out to some of their loyal listeners and of course there were presenters and staff on hand with their opinions too. I asked for this so I could get both all sides of what the station wanted, by combining the listener’s wants with how the presenters thought that images and features should look this gave me a great look at the type of website I should be building for everyone. My research especially helped me put while I was in the meetings as I was able to put forward ideas of how other stations had implemented similar features to what the group was suggesting and why I thought that the stations implementation of that feature either looks great or why you wouldn’t want yours to look the same.
After this, I spent around 2 weeks working on getting the live site working. This consisted of me, getting a staging domain this should be a domain that is similar to the live one however can’t be accessed by the public unless they are specifically told the domain. This helps to keep what the site looks like secret to the public while still being able to share it around the company, sorting out somewhere to host the staging site this is just a server that is accessible by the internet so wasn’t that hard to find and set up looking at the different plugins and themes that would be needed for the website as well as the content that would be on each of the pages.
Overall I didn’t face any significant issues because I am confident with web design and already very ‘in the know’ about radio websites, the Youths Choice brand, and the design and development process of other stations’ websites and marketing. The most important part of this project for the client was the final website that was given to them. They have loved it so far and both we and they have had a lot of positive feedback from their audience (via our small feedback widgets in various places around the website), this has been great to see! The client personally got back in contact with us a few weeks later saying that they really liked the website and says that it has achieved the goal that they set out witch was to have more people engaged and listening to what the station is doing!