Here’s What You Should Put within the Main Menu of Your Radio Station’s Website

Posted On Jul 23, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

One of the most crucial components of a radio station’s website is the main menu. After all, this is the first thing most guests click on when they’re trying to find a specific page on the site. A good prime menu forms the user experience enjoyable, while I bad one can be infuriating. If you haven’t scrutinized the piloting on your website in a while, examine it with a fresh duo of seeings. Here’s what should be in your website’s main menu 😛 TAGEND

1. Home

Perhaps people can return to your home page at any time by click your station’s logo in the upper left-hand corner, but don’t assume that everybody knows that. I used to leave “Home” out of the main menu because I figured everybody knew this. Then I started leading website usability exams and I have found that I was wrong. Apparently, there are internet users who are unaware of this secret. So I now include “Home” as the first item in the main menu of every website that I create.

2. DJs

On-air personalities are one of the largest part differentiators between radio and streaming services, and as such, they deserve pre-eminent mention. Listeners want to know more about their favorite temperaments, so links to their bios or blogs should go in the main menu. Don’t use the word “On Air” — everything your station does, from music to commercial-grades, is on air. Don’t say “Jocks; ” that’s industry jargon. To the average person, Tom Brady is a jock; Bubba the Love Sponge is not. Use “DJs” because that’s the expression your listeners use.

3. Music

If your station plays new music in current rotation, you’ll probably want to include a link to the playlist in the main menu.

4. Events or Concerts

Concerts are happenings, so do not use both sets of expressions in the main menu; it’s confusing. You can include Concerts as a submenu part under Phenomena if you’ve got something else, like “Club Nights, ” or “Street Team Stops” that you likewise want to include under “Events.” Otherwise, skip the word “Events” wholly and time use “Concerts.” The Concert Calendar page is often one of the more popular pages on a radio station’s website…

…except when there’s a global pandemic. During the COVID crisis, you’ve got a choice: either be diligent about mentioning all the cancellations and rescheduling with concerts, or — if you don’t have the manpower to stay on top of it — remove this sheet from prime menu altogether. Don’t placed a Concert Calendar full of outdated and incorrect information on your website.

5. Contests

Once again, this assumes that your station is running races. If the pandemic has caused the award closet to run dry, you may want to remove this from the prime menu for the time being. Don’t leave an empty Contests sheet up on your website.

6. Podcasts

If your terminal is making podcasts, spawn them easy to find by putting them in the main menu.

“But wait !, ” you cry. “We’re putting our morning show’s podcast on the morning reveal sheet, which falls under’ DJs’! ”

Here’s a soiled little secret about website sailing: It’s okay to link to the same page in two different places. Some people will get to that sheet one course, and others will get to it another way, but the most important thing is that they are able to get there.

For example, if you go to the main menu on this website and hover your cursor over “Events, ” you will see a submenu item called “Webinars.” If you then move your cursor to “Resources, ” you will see a submenu piece titled “Webinar Recordings.” Guess what? Both of those ties-in go to the same page. We discovered in our usability testing that folks were looking for the upcoming webinars under one foreman and the past webinar records under another. Because we have both of those on the same page, we linked to that sheet from two different places in the menu.

6. Advertise

I’m always stupefied by the number of radio station websites I encounter that embed the link to the “Advertise With Us” page in the website footer, or worse, don’t have one at all — simply a “Contact” page. If people want to give you money, make it as easy as possible for them. The “Advertise With Us” page is arguably the single most valuable page on your website, so employed an “Advertise” associate in the main menu where everybody can easily attain it.

7. Contact

This one is pretty self-explanatory.

This is a list of things to include in your main menu, but I’ve also compiled this list of mistakes to avoid.

One final memorandum: Unavoidably, after forming their prime menu, website designers have leftover tie-ups that don’t fit neatly as submenu entries under any of the other leaders, so they cram them all under a catch-all term. On radio station websites, that expression is often something like “Connect With Us.” I’m not a fan of this kind of thing, but it happens all the time. Even on our own website, we have a catch-all term: “Resources.” Sure fairly, these periods don’t perform very well in usability assessments, but sometimes they can’t be avoided.