RadioVillage.com Demonstration Site|Basic Version

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This demonstration website, based on the one we used for our SE Iowa radio stations, is to show a number of features and components that you can integrate into your site to enhance content, drive traffic and make money.

Click here to see our "Updater" information-server version

A Quick Tour

FRONT PAGE | NEWS PAGE | WEATHER PAGE

Click here to open the site in another browser window or tab. You can easily switch between the site and this page.

Front Page

We have added several features to enhance the site; most are free, some are for barter, some require an investment. Here is a screen shot of the front page; the numbered bullets are explained below.

The features:

  1. By convention, the top bar of every page is a link back to the home page.
  2. These ads are handled by AdButler, a service that lets you rotate and track your ads.
  3. This weather display is from Weather Underground. Other weather sites offer add-ins, too, like The Weather Channel; find the one that best fits the look of your site and your space requirements. (We resized our display slightly -- from 127 pixels wide to 120 pixels -- to conform to our .format.)
  4. The "Listen" button links to a player with a menu of local programs to hear. See RadioP1 for more information.
  5. The "Drag This Link" line is Javascript code, readily available on the Web; for a good selection, see The Javascript Source. The text and instructions are browser-specific; in Internet Explorer, it says, "Make RadioVillage.com Your Home Page" and doesn't require dragging.
  6. This news crawler is available to ABC affiliates; find it on the affiliate web site. Most other networks and news services offer similar services; check out CNN and MSNBC. Again, find the display that fits your site best.
  7. The "Bookmark" button is from AddThis. not only makes it easy for users to bookmark your site in their browsers and at other sites, but it also tracks usage.

News Page

The news page demonstrates the use of a blog website to make it easy for station personnel to enter and maintain information (e.g., news, sports, etc.) The links on the front page (see above) for news, sports and other information features take the visitor to a specific "Label" that you create or use when you post an entry. (In our case, we have labels for News, Sports, Funerals, Community, Entertainment, Lunch Menus and our "Spotlight" community-affairs show -- all the things that get updated regularly by station people.)

Note that we have made the design of this site as much like the main site as possible. It takes a bit of web savvy (some knowledge of HTML is helpful) to customize the blog pages, but once it's done, the maintenance is low to none.

Advantages of using an external blog site:

  • It's free.
  • It's easy for station personnel to use.
  • It's easy to include photos, videos and sound.

Disadvantages:

  • You don't have full control over design or navigation.
  • Station personnel must each sign up with Google to post to your blog.

All in all, it's a good solution for most small-market sites.

The following image demonstrates how a "reporter" logs on and enters a story -- and what that story looks like on the Blogger page:

Here is more information about the Blogger page:

Design notes:

  1. We inserted an image that is similar to the header graphic on the home site, so the Blogger pages look and feel like the home site.
  2. We filtered for Label = "News" and used that as the link from the home site's "News" button. (Ditto the other information categories.)
  3. We couldn't link the header graphic back to the home site, so we made the home site link prominent on the page.
  4. We placed a Weather Underground "sticker" on this page, consistent with the one on our home page.
  5. These are links to all the information categories (labels).
  6. These are links to specific pages on the home site.
  7. A poll is one of the many elements available from Blogger. You can add any element using plain text, HTML, Javascript, etc.

Weather Page

The following screen shot of the Weather page shows a couple of other free add-ins:

Here are the features:

  1. Allergy report from Pollen.com.
  2. Flu conditions from FluStar.
  3. Temperature bugs from Weather Underground.