I recently launched a new website for Macarthur Community Radio – a local community radio station covering the booming region of South-West Sydney. Find out about the process & technology behind this new website.

For this project, I brought to the table many years of radio website experience, tried and tested off-the-shelf solutions, as well as some necessary customisations and bespoke software. In consultation with the station’s board, this website project commenced in early 2019, and primary development was completed in a period of just a few weeks.

Here is a list of some of the technology we used:

This project followed my standard radio station website development process. Due to my experience in this space, I was able to provide steps one to seven as a part of the proposal & quote process – delivering a thorough proposal & fixed-price quote.

Using my knowledge of best-practice radio station website design, and taking on board feedback from the station, I created the initial page wireframes (including both mobile, tablet & desktop), then turned these into full Photoshop mockups, and then built the site using the Foundation responsive framework.

One key piece of development was surrounding MetaRadio. For the station, I have developed a program guide feature – including a standard ‘grid’ layout, and a collapsed layout for mobile devices. The station doesn’t currently have an automation system capable of pushing out now-playing data, but when they upgrade, MetaRadio will be ready for them to accept this song data and send it to the website. This new functionality in MetaRadio will be available to all MetaRadio users soon.

The homepage features a variety of key aspects of the radio station, including:

  • Latest Posts
  • On-Air Now / Listen Live / Contact & Connect
  • Program Guide
  • Key Pages
  • Sponsors
  • Featured Pages
  • Social Media

We have used Gravity Forms to assist with lead generation, and community event submission.

The Sponsor and Event sections are WordPress Custom Post Types with custom meta fields and templates. In the case of local events, users can submit the form and it automatically create a Custom Post in WordPress – simply requiring editing & approval by a volunteer at the station, instead of having to deal with manual data entry.

In my humble opinion, the new website is a pretty big improvement over the old site:

In the short time since it’s launched, the site has seen good engagement and time on page across key pages, including the live streaming player & program guide. We’ve also seen positive SEO impacts, including an increased average rank and the appearance of Site Links below some of the main SERP listings. The new website has also begun to help attract new sponsors to the station – and by the station’s estimates, the website should pay for itself before long.

If you want to explore developing a new website for your community radio station, please get in touch with me.