IS YOUR WEB DESIGNER DRIVING AWAY YOUR SITE'S VISITORS?

Your radio station website is not a playground for your webmaster — or a dumping ground for the cookie cutter output of an outsourced provider. It's a marketing tool. It's a valuable opportunity to further engage your listeners or clients.

You agree? Good. But have you made that clear to your Web designer?

For example....

Splash Pages

Have you ever had the experience of clicking on a link or entering a Web address and instead of being taken to the home page, you arrive at a page that says:

“Welcome! Click here to enter.”

That’s a splash page.

Splash pages waste people’s time.

People already did the work to come to your site. It’s crazy to ask them to do more work now.

Think about your radio station. You use marketing and promotions and advertising to convince people to sample your station. Direct mail, TV, billboards, busboards:

“Listen Thursday morning at 7:10 for our $10,000 birthday song, on 102.7!”

You finally convince someone to tune in 102.7 for your $10,000 birthday song. They tune in to 102.7 and what they hear is:

“Thank you for tuning in 102.7, now go to 103.1!”

Your radio station wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that. Why would your website be that stupid?

The only valid reason for a station website to have a splash page is if you have a site that offers information in more than one language:

“Welcome to RadioX.com. Click here for the English presentation, click here for Spanish, click here for Norwegian.”

Otherwise, splash pages only serve the purpose of wasting people’s time.

You can confirm this with your own experience. You know what it’s like to click on a link or type in a URL and end up at something that says, “Click here to enter.”

When that happens, what is your response?

If you’re like most people, your response is one of annoyance: “Why do I have to click to enter? Just put me there!”

For more ideas on how to maximize the value of your radio station's website, here's a handy resource.