One of the most common mistakes people make in setting up a website is buying a WordPress theme based on looks. Then it turns out to be difficult to customize, so bloated it runs super slow, or buggy with unresponsive customer support. Sometimes you even get bitten by hidden renewal costs. It’s like buying a flashy looking car, only to get home to find it has major mechanical troubles. Sadly, it happens every day.

But it can be even worse than that, and here’s why… While you can have as many WordPress plugins active as you like, you can only have one active theme. This can be a big problem if your theme handles your core radio features. Because when you need to redesign, you’ll find – to your dismay – that you’re “locked in” to the theme. Switching is going to mean losing your work, and further costing you in time and money setting up a new system.

This is exactly why Radio Station PRO works as a plugin rather than a theme. We’ve put a lot of work in “under the hood” to keep the core features independent but compatible with any theme you want. Like a reliable engine that you can easily use in any car.

One of the greatest things about traditional radio is that listeners could find you easily – just by flipping a dial. Nowadays they could be living next door and not know you even exist! The internet has given us access to so many channels, but at the cost of choice and information overload – making it hard for listeners to find the content they really enjoy.

You may have heard the old internet marketing adage that “content is king” for search engine optimization. The basic premise is that search engines love content such as relevant, keyword-rich written articles, so these can bring good organic traffic to your website. However, while the technology is improving for crawling audio content, it certainly isn’t quite there yet. This means it’s still difficult for listeners to find their favourite shows using a text-based search.

And herein lies the hidden opportunity. If you can bring more of your audio-related content onto your website in text form, you can gain the SEO benefits, leading to increased website traffic and ultimately more listeners. This is where the in-built post types, genre tags, automatically generate pages, and internal linking in Radio Station PRO really helps. You just need to ensure that your team adds as much relevant content as they have!

What happens when your visitors browse your website? And what makes them come back? It’s a mystery that has plagued webmasters since the dawn of the internet. There’s a special place in the archives for dead startups that got it really wrong. Broadly speaking though, it tends to come down to two main things – content and engagement.

Of the two, engagement is the tougher nut to crack. It may seem like common sense that if your site is more useable, then more people will keep using it. But seemingly subtle things you wouldn’t expect can have a massive impact. Even the same interface built one way or another can make all the difference. Done well, it can bring joy and a sense of fun, and mean coming back for more. Or done badly, it can cause the agony of frustration and mean never coming back again. Multiply that experience over and over again with each visitor, and it means the difference between your online success or failure.

These days, user experience design (UX) and user interface design (UI) are entire expert fields in their own right. It requires a lot of thoughtful planning and technical knowledge to create engaging web experiences. This is what we devote our attention to in Radio Station PRO. We’re constantly in the process of testing and tweaking our interfaces, as well as adding new enhancements to increase visitor engagement.