Professional Podcast Website Creation

Product/Client

Product was a currently existing podcast that was looking to move from within a professional organization member magazine website to its own domain website. The podcast highlights the success stories of the members of its host professional association for operations research and data analytics.

Problem

The client wanted to grow the audience and awareness of the podcast but needed a better landing page to bring them to than one long episode list. The podcast’s previous web home was within an online member magazine which made searching for and customizing difficult for the podcast-specific content. Podcast episodes were listed in one long scrollable list with no way to filter or find specific episodes or tags other than the main search that included two magazines and numerous academic journals of additional content.

What Happened

Researched for What Podcast Listeners Want from a Website

I started by performing functionality audits of similar podcast websites for the audience type and size, then also looked at a couple of podcast websites that were well reviewed for their searchability and quality of episode information. I then looked into CMS solutions that would easily allow for frontend customization and make episode upload and maintenance as easy as possible for the podcast host.

Design Focused on Ease of Navigation and Interconnection Between Episodes

After reviewing the collected criteria and options with the client, I began wireframing the structure of the new website, making sure to focus on interconnectivity and ease of navigation. With the overall content needs of the website not being very large, I was able to condense the number of templates needed quickly at this stage before starting development.

I then began mocking up designs that focused on combining the podcast and client organization branding. The main look of the website came from the main imagery for the podcast with many of the smaller details such as fonts and colors coming from the parent brand.

I continued to focus on ease of navigation here by finding small but very consistent ways to visually connect elements together and paid extra attention to how the eye would flow around the page. I broke episodes into cards and made sure to have information displayed consistently across various forms of episode cards. From the research done, I also made sure to include multiple ways to view episode information at any given time from including audio players in all episode instances to having accordions with episode transcripts in the episode pages.

Developed a Highly Customized Yet Easily Maintainable Website

For developing the frontend of the new website, I customized a base wordpress theme and added a plugin to allow for additional Page and Post fields. This gave the podcast host many more options for each template without requiring any technical knowledge. I was able to further customize these fields with consistent CSS and patterns to allow the templates to appear consistently whether or not the fields were used.

Before launch, I performed all needed browser testing and applied any needed fixes. I also performed page load optimization compression and testing as it was important to the client that the website perform well on mobile. I also helped bring over all previous episodes from the previous CMS, adding in imagery, tagging, and SEO for each.

The launch of the new podcast website was smooth and successful, with excellent feedback from users and stakeholders that highlighted its look and ease of use.

Outcomes & Lessons Learned

Year End Analytics

• Page views saw a 42% increase
• Unique page views saw a 39% increase
• Entrances increased by 24%
• Exits decreased by 3.6%

Overall Success: Very Happy Client Who Asked to Work with Me Again

The client was very happy with their end product and reached back out to me a few months later about some additional features they wanted added. They were thrilled with how easy it was for them to continue to maintain and the much improved search functions.

Initial Discovery Work Saved a Lot of Work by Digging into Functional Complexity Early

The initial conversations and discovery about functionality for the website were crucial to the success of this project. Particularly with the CMS selection and the customization of the CMS to suit the client’s needs, this could have been disastrous and added a great deal more time to the project timeline without having uncovered and dug into so much of the project requirements from the very start. With those in place, the development was actually very quick and smooth, with the initial CMS installation to launch taking place in less than a month while working on other projects as well.