Most of us have visited websites that, quite frankly, sucked. I've seen a few in the Part 15 world.
A good website can be a very useful tool for a Part 15 station, particularly if you stream.
Here are some things to avoid in your website, based on my experience:
- Wordiness. Websites that go on and on in a single page, repeating ad nauseum and requiring excessive scrolling. Lack of conciseness in content (which is the real purpose of any website) leads to difficulty in finding specific information. If you have a lot to say, break up the material into multiple pages, each with only one theme.
- Poor grammar and spelling. How can you trust the content of a website with these kinds of simple mistakes? There are grammar and spell checkers if you don't have a solid grasp of the English language. Use them.
- Sensory Overload. Yes, fancy graphics are cool. Color can be cool. But too much can be, well, too much. They can take away from what you're trying to say.
- Slowness. Simplicity means speed. You generally only have a very short period of time to impress the viewer, and taking seconds to load pages (or even to start loading a page) can cause the viewer to just go away. Enough said.
Those are some of my bugaboo's at any rate.
Some say that the Artisan Radio website is too simple. I prefer black and white and concise, simple messages. I try to say what I want to say as quickly as possible, fitting each page into a single, reasonably sized window (or, at the very least, with minimal scrolling).
My time is valuable, and I assume that the viewer's time is as well. I try not to waste it.
Artisan's guide to making a better website attracts me because I used to offer a website building service to generate income for myself, and also because kdxradio.com is a website I keep in conjunction with my part 15 over-the-air and streaming radio stations. My history as a website builder is very short because I only had one client who fired me because I couldn't satisfy her vision of the website of her dreams. She wanted a lot of animated events, sound effects, and moving fonts much like a motion picture from Vegas. My own style based on my ability and artistic philosophy was minimalism and simplicity. She made one generous attempt to retain me by offering to purchase the high-end web authoring software that would do all the gimmicks, but I rejected the offer because I had no interest in learning how to do glitzy work. I hated the idea of having Wayne Newton float into the screen singing one of his trademark songs, and figured that there'd be a huge copyright issue. So I just built my own website using a very basic HTML software called 'Komposer' and have kept the site alive even though I don't really need it. Although it is worth mentioning that during recent years my website has made The Blare Blog possible, helping to fill the vacuum while part15.org was offline. Most of my website is bloat that has accumulated during spurts of enthusiasm when I added things that are never updated.