Wordpress theme for community radio station
August 28, 2013 5:24 PM Subscribe
Our community radio station currently uses Google sites for their site. We want to move to a Wordpress site and I am looking for premium theme and plug-in recommendations. Also links to other community radio stations that use wordpress would be grand.
The Google site is ugly, slow, and cumbersome. It was also made by someone who is no longer around. I am pretty familiar with wordpress and the station manager likes the back-end dashboard.
We will be getting a grant for the change-over and implementation. There will not be many back-end users - probably four maximum.
Main features - a listen live plugin, program calendar (by the day and hour) integration and a notice board. Images of station sponsored events are currently managed through picasa, with station sponsor images and ads hosted on-site.
We will be keeping our google apps for email management etc.
The Google site is ugly, slow, and cumbersome. It was also made by someone who is no longer around. I am pretty familiar with wordpress and the station manager likes the back-end dashboard.
We will be getting a grant for the change-over and implementation. There will not be many back-end users - probably four maximum.
Main features - a listen live plugin, program calendar (by the day and hour) integration and a notice board. Images of station sponsored events are currently managed through picasa, with station sponsor images and ads hosted on-site.
We will be keeping our google apps for email management etc.
No specific theme recommendations, but our local Western Mass community radio station looks like it's running on Wordpress, uses JW Player to serve the live stream, and has an embedded Google Calendar widget for the programming schedule.
posted by drumcorpse at 6:16 PM on August 28, 2013
posted by drumcorpse at 6:16 PM on August 28, 2013
Check your MeMail, I'm have an email address for you that should answer your questions.
posted by Trivia Newton John at 7:55 PM on August 28, 2013
posted by Trivia Newton John at 7:55 PM on August 28, 2013
Thanks for alerting me to this thread, jessamyn.
jessamyn is correct that I am using the basic twentyten theme, and honestly it is because I have so much work to do as technical director of the station that I really don't have time for web development or even prettying things up.I am interested in possibly moving the site to Twentythirteen though. A bit more modern.
Like the Western Mass community radio mentioned by drumcorpse above, we use Google calendar for the scheduling (click on the Friday Morning Mix at 7am to see what I have done with my own show's listing), and a JW player for the stream that was copy and paste from our streaming service. I simply added some colour to the widgets to make them stand out a bit. The Google calendar makes it much easier for us to manage our schedule as it is constantly changing. We only went on the air in March, and as expected DJs are coming and going.
So I will be monitoring this thread to see if any good themes can be recommended. I am willing to pay for a professional theme, but often even the demos don't give me enough information to warrant dropping money only to be disappointed later.
The one piece of advice I have is to make sure you rename your theme if you make any significant changes to it. I didn't, and when Wordpress 3.6 came out, and they updated twentyten, I spent way too much time going back and changing the column widths and other small changes I had made.
Good luck!
posted by terrapin at 5:26 AM on August 29, 2013
jessamyn is correct that I am using the basic twentyten theme, and honestly it is because I have so much work to do as technical director of the station that I really don't have time for web development or even prettying things up.I am interested in possibly moving the site to Twentythirteen though. A bit more modern.
Like the Western Mass community radio mentioned by drumcorpse above, we use Google calendar for the scheduling (click on the Friday Morning Mix at 7am to see what I have done with my own show's listing), and a JW player for the stream that was copy and paste from our streaming service. I simply added some colour to the widgets to make them stand out a bit. The Google calendar makes it much easier for us to manage our schedule as it is constantly changing. We only went on the air in March, and as expected DJs are coming and going.
So I will be monitoring this thread to see if any good themes can be recommended. I am willing to pay for a professional theme, but often even the demos don't give me enough information to warrant dropping money only to be disappointed later.
The one piece of advice I have is to make sure you rename your theme if you make any significant changes to it. I didn't, and when Wordpress 3.6 came out, and they updated twentyten, I spent way too much time going back and changing the column widths and other small changes I had made.
Good luck!
posted by terrapin at 5:26 AM on August 29, 2013
I know WGOT uses Wordpress. Let me know if you want the specifics of the install/themes. I believe they also use google calendar for the program calendar.
posted by newsomz at 8:18 AM on August 29, 2013
posted by newsomz at 8:18 AM on August 29, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jessamyn at 6:03 PM on August 28, 2013