An Efficient Use Of Homepage Space
Written Aug. 20, 2008 by Sean Ross in Internet Radio with 1 Comment
It's a recent rule of station Website design, but it has become almost as well-entrenched as the apparent rule that music stations must show their image artists at the top right of the homepage: With so many different things to sell on their homepage, many stations have gone to those rotating panels of 4-5 items, thus ensuring that their major contests will be harder to Google and won't be easily found even when listeners are on the site.
The alternative -- five or six big panels stacked on each other -- isn't much better.
So good for the folks at Christian CHR network Air 1 for finding another design that allows multiple items to be seen at the same time and still saves space (although I don't know if it solves the Google problem).
Reader Comments
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I count 40 links on the front page. I find the design ill-conceived.
There are two kinds of website landing pages:
1- the kind whereby natural search engines find something searched for by the viewer. For type 1 there are many rules which could be summarized as: specificity to a term or phrase being searched for.
2- The kind where they say 'screw search rules' we'll get the viewers by telling them about it. That's what this is.
For type 2, there still needs to be an easy to follow scheme, not unlike a natural flow. This site has way too much competing for attention. It would be almost impossible for a casual user to find the updated material buried in whichever of the 40 links are active.
From my experience, few radio sites really understand the value they may provide to the listener/viewer. For that reason they are largely unfocused, and most are type 2 sites with hidden treasure (if that) most viewers won't dig to find.
If the purpose of a website is (and it should be) to further engage the listener and extend the brand, many sites are, unfortunately, missing the mark.