My research of radio station sites in the last 48 hours has told me that the vast majority of them are ... well to put it bluntly, they're a wank.
Few of them provide content that's relevant to the activities of the stations, aside from program guides and some pictures of some of the hosts. But of course that could well mean that the stations don't have much of an idea themselves about a purpose for their existence. No sense of involvement with their communities, and trying to engage the activities of their listeners. I haven't found a single one yet that's even close to being built on web standards. The notable exceptions would be the BBC and the Australian ABC sites and the US NPR sites which have heaps of content related to the station's shows and activities. The ones that do provide relevant content are pretty dismal in web standards terms - pretty awful looking and the code is amateur for most of them. So we're embarking on what we hope is going to be a different kind of radio station site. Our station is a community station, running on a shoestring, but our sound isn't amateur so our web site can't be. Our station is supposed to be a part of our local community and we're going to have a go at involving the community in the web site as well as the station. Community events, local news that sort of thing, if we can figure out the way to do it without taking a lot of ongoing effort. And we're going to build it using XHTML. Strict if we can go that far. We're going to fully separate content from logic from presentation so updates in the future will be easy. In other words it's going to be a proof of the concept that building to web standards saves development time, effort and ongoing maintenance. Even though it's a probono site for me, we're going to keep records of the time spent. Does anyone want to have a go at the design side of it? We want to produce a flexible, outstanding standards-based site and have few limitations on what we can and can't do, other than functional limitations. We can't pay money - there's no money for the project. It's my contribution to the station, but we can pay with ads on the station. It would suit someone working around western Sydney if the ads would mean something to your business. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Horner Sent: Thursday, 15 July 2004 5:32 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] Good radio station sites? >I'd be interested in John Horner's comments on this, as he's a >member of this list. Hey, put me on the spot why don't you? >Given the ABC is a government organisation shouldn't they really be >fulfilling some requirements of the DDA? Yes, yes we should, though traditionally Triple J has operated very much as their own unit, both in terms of online and the organisation in general, and that's probably as it should be. I really can't answer for their decisions or even be sure what they were. >Nice design tho'. Well exactly. ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
