A custom website design & build.
Radio Catskill does a lot. It’s a radio station, newsroom, podcast network, community calendar, music guide and a place to find out what is happening across the Catskills and Northeast Pennsylvania.
I was looking for somewhere to volunteer in my local community and the station’s news coverage really impressed me. Our first task was getting the site to load consistently, it was experiencing 40s delays. We moved it to wordpress.com hosting and I reduced the number of plugins to about 40 from twice that. We stabilized the site.
My aims for the redesign were: a consistently fast, accessible, standards compliant site; making a site that integrated all of the station’s activities and channels; and making a simple, elegant, and easy to use site (for both visitors and admins).
Jill Fruchter, a Radio Catskill Board Member and user experience researcher and strategist, had completed user research with the staff, volunteers, and listeners of the station. One idea kept coming through: belonging. Radio Catskill isn’t only something you listen to. It’s part of how people find out what is happening around them and connect with where they live.
This became my overriding theme.
The homepage puts local news and culture front and center, alongside what’s on air now, what’s coming next, podcasts, events, music, and ways to support the station. Making it work well on mobile was very important: it’s a responsive site, and both the order and number of items in the various sections of the home page are different on mobile and desktop. The site is a custom design & build WordPress theme.
Learn more about the process and thinking in my interview with the station for the show Radio Chatskill.
I increasingly think of this kind of work as systems design as much as web design: understanding a complicated collection of things, working out how they fit together, then trying to make the complexity disappear.
The new Radio Catskill site is a simple digital home for a very busy local radio station.