Most of you that know me also know that I’ve been working on a complete redesign of KeokukRadio.com. You know because I’ve done little else with my free time, and a lot of time at work, other than work on this site. I’ve been working on a couple of other sites as well, but this one took quite a bit of time to figure out how to do all of the cool things that make it unique.
First off, I built it using WordPress as a platform. I’ve built a few blogs that way, but have just begun using it as a complete web site solution. I have to say, it works very well! The literally thousands of themes and plugins available make it quicker and more stable than using a traditional web design application like Dreamweaver or Expression Web. I know, I know… some of you long-time pros are yelling at your monitors right now, telling the virtues of using a “real tool” to do the work. I’ve used those, too, and believe me when I say “I’m done with them.”
I’ve learned a lot in the past several weeks. Taking a custom these, editing the PHP, shoe-horning plugins into the mix, and tweaking the output of everything is still challenging. But I really enjoyed digging into the WordPress community and finding an overwhelming amount of support and ideas.
Enough about the coding crap. Let’s get to the good stuff!
Keokuk Radio approached me because they really couldn’t stand the design that an ex-employee has left them with. The pages were dark and unreadable, the site structure was confusing at best, and the whole thing felt incomplete. Instead of attempting to fix it, I suggested that we scrap it altogether and put something fresh in its place.
The result is a brighter, logically-structured, dynamic site with many social media integrations. For example, when a photo is added to the radio group’s Facebook Fan page (also new), the pictures are automatically added to a special Photos page on the site. Comments to that Fan page are also pushed to Twitter along with every News, Sports, or Cancellations post. And one of my favorite little features is the Cancellations and Delays link and post that automatically appear on the home page when that post is set to Published. A very easy-to-use system that’s also pleasing to the eye.
Two other sections to get a massive redo are the Community Calendar and the Sports Calendars. A visitor sees the Community Calendar in a sidebar widget but can also see a larger view on a separate page. This calendar is populated via an API feed from a special Google Calendar. In addition, each of the 12 sports covered by the radio stations has its own embedded calendar. There’s an All Sports Calendar that combined all of these into one comprehensive page, too. And each of these calendars is available via subscription so that users can integrated them into Outlook, iCal, or their own Google Calendars. Pretty slick, if I do say so myself!
If you’re still reading, why not take a couple of minutes and check out the site. Let me know what you like — you can keep what you don’t like to yourself =) — and give me ideas if you see room for improvement.
One more thing: I really want to say thanks to the whole group at Keokuk Radio. They’ve been AWESOME to work with and gave up a lot of control to me so that I could experiment with ideas. Those of you that design web sites, do any creative work, or really just anyone that deals with customers, know how impressive it is to work with clients that appreciate you and actually help with the whole process. I can only hope that my future clients are half as accommodating!
