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Friday Poll: Radio Station Websites, Part I

This week's poll question will be the first in a series of questions on the topic of radio station websites. We'd like to learn how you use your website to enhance or complement your station's programming, promotions, ad campaigns, etc.

So here's this week's question, a two-parter:

1) Who created your radio station website? Someone in-house or an outside web design firm?

2) Who maintains your website? A designated part-time or full-time station employee or an outside contractor?

Thank you for your participation!

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Permalink Reply by Kent Lankford on February 19, 2010 at 6:29am

WAKO AM FM utilizes our on in house talents. Gil T. Wilson our evening talent designed and
maintians our web site which is wakoradio.com

Check it out....

Kent Lankford
WAKO 103.1 FM & THE BIG AM 910
Lawrenceville Ill. -- Vincennes, Ind.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Rolando on February 19, 2010 at 6:37am

Our main web site is www.justsaynews.com. It is a new site. It was developed by us and executed and hosted by an outside company (see bottom of site for details). It is maintained by a part time person, and is fed by stringers. All in costs maybe $2000 per month to operate. It is cash flowing. Our other site is www.thriftymart.com.

My experience on web sites: There has to be a reason for someone to go there and then go back there again. I have found nothing that brings people back except local news, and a better job of it than the local news paper. Can you make money on it? Yeah, probably. But not the way we can make money on a radio schedule. Think about this for a minute... figure out how many man-hours went into designing, posting and maintaining a web site. Now put all those hours into making ONE radio presentation and what do you have? A much better chance of closing and a higher ROI for the stations.
Last though on this: If your site does not have good metrics built in, you have no idea if anyone is seeing it! I'm not talking about "hits" on the site. They are meaningless. I am talking about Unique visitors per hour/day/week/month... pages viewed on average, click throughs and referring pages. You NEED to know if you are hitting the mark or not. With JustSayNews.com we know that about 14,000 unique visitors hit us per week, looking at about 2.34 pages, spending on average 3 minutes on the site. We also know that of tyhe 2400 people we email the front page two, on any given day only about 40% open the email.
Look at web... but keep your eyes on the radio stations!

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Permalink Reply by M. Delores Wood on February 19, 2010 at 9:01am

We sent one of our staff to a special college course to learn to design websites. She, with the help of another employee designed our site, and maintain it daily. www.wrjwradio.com

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Permalink Reply by Michael T. Boldt on February 19, 2010 at 9:23am

We worked with an outside company for designing our two FM sites. The build was on a 1/2 trade 1/2 cash basis and the maintenance is all trade. This works because we trade promo mentions when promoting our site...i.e. powered by "XYZ Company" so they get a lot of exposure without taking up avails.

We are a small staff, with most people doing multiple jobs. I just didn't feel I could put more on our staff and feel confident it was getting updated regularly.