New Ideas For Your Web Site

Every day your web site becomes more important to interacting with the audience. One of the BIG differences in the web and the new media competition it represents is that the audience can interact with it. They can customize it, broadcast themselves on it, custom search it, and with all the video, audio, text and animation toys all connected to the whole world. It's become both competition for us and also a huge opportunity for us to interact and build stronger P1 relationships with the audience.

Maybe its because we are trained in broadcasting - where we have the transmitter and send out the entertainment. In the web world the audience can become their own entertainment and can broadcast their signals and receive signals from nearly anyone else on the web. We have to get used to this new world and start to use it wisely.

There are so many opportunities to take our brands and the entertainment we already produce and use it to stand out in the new web world. Here's some new ideas you should be considering built around WIDGETS. Look to you left and you will see a widget with the 'Star Trek Cube' which you can control by clicking on it and moving it around. It's a little html code that was just pasted into the blog and you can get tons of them on http://www.kickapps.com/ or http://www.widgetbox.com/ . There are plenty of ideas in the widgets you could use on your site:

• Music Players - Many of the widgets are linked to music players which you could load up with songs - perhaps your top 10 at 10 every night. Maybe you could also set up a social network type page where the listeners could post their top 5 songs and allow anyone to hear all the songs streamed on the player. Maybe you could also cue up the top morning show bits and play them. The list is endless.
• Games - From Asteroids to Sudoku puzzles they have tons already to download.
• Video Players - Some link to You Tube and other sites and you have to post the videos there or pick from what they have but they also have ones that automatically pick the top viewed videos.
• RSS Feeds - Want to get the latest music news, gossip, or sports in a unique display with cool graphics - widgets have them.
• Countdown Clocks - Only 15 days, 12 hours and 45 minutes till the A-Z weekend starts on Rock 101.
• Pick Slide shows - There are widgets that could display recent picks from the morning show stunts or the recent 'big concert.'

I'm sure you can find a lot more uses for widgets and it might also be fun to find out how to make one of these just for the station. For example create a spinning logo with some graphics that people could insert on their myspace pages that links back to the station's site to build traffic. Or make up a really cool looking video or audio player branded with your station that they could steal for their site.

Hopefully you do have control of your site. In my visits I often run into sites where most of the layout and access is either handled by an outside party working on trade or there's one IT person at the station and unless they are 'into' doing it the site just sits there. It's not that hard to do lots of stuff yourself. Look at the creativity on the myspace sites with all the special skins, layout templates, widgets and tricks. The pages are so filled with content, but most of the time people are adding feeds, widgets, and layout templates that do a lot of the work automatically. You can do the same with your site.