On Friday I finished the shell for the new XXfm (currently known as 2XXfm - more on this in a minute) website - you can check out the whole site here - http://www.users.bigpond.com/colsim
This isn't the first time I've worked on the XXfm website but it's certainly been a different experience to the last one. For one thing, I've learnt a fair slab of CSS this time. (Whoo, welcome to 1998 :) This means that the site is lightweight (ie - small file size meaning that it loads quickly) and that it's easier to change.
I could go off on a big bitch about the way that politics, ego and empire building have made it more difficult to go about implementing the website (which strictly speaking still isn't finished) but frankly that would involve joining the game and I would just as rather not. Besides, I'm sure that some of my actions are probably relatively controversial (in a small community volunteer organisation sense, not in a logical sense) and I could do without the aggravation. So I won't.
Suffice to say that the station has been known as 2XX ever since we switched from the AM band (where all call-signs are 2 letters prefaced by a number indicating the state/territory that you are in). My feeling is that the station identity needs a revamp and that 2xx suggests that we are still an AM station (in attitude at the very least).
Shifting to XXfm seems a logical move. (Technically, the station callsign was changed to 1XXR fm when we go the FM license but XX seems a little stronger, edgier. )
Having been involved in a volunteer community organisation before however where we tried to change the name, I know that this is a highly contentious issue - we went from RAT tv (Richmond Access Television) to YCAT (Yarra Community Access Tv). Yarra TV - my suggestion, died in committee. (I read a quote a while back that
committees are the cul-de-sacs that ideas are lured down and quietly strangled).
Anyway, my point is that changing the name - and ideally the logo, as this has been around as long as the station - is going to cause ructions. I have full support from station management but there are some there who aren't necessarily on top on things when it comes to dealing with people.
Wow, I guess this has all been building up in me for a while.
Getting back to the website building, I started by investigating as many other community radio stations as possible, getting an idea of the kind of content that they provide and stealing as many good ideas as I could find. This included sections like - how do I get my band on air, announcer and listener profiles and a community discussion board.
To this I've added things that I haven't seen on other sites but that I have come across in the course of general browsing and investigating nifty web tools for work (Flickr badges, interactive Google maps) and added the possibility of user generated content - XXfm promos and custom designed banner ads for the station.
This progressed to whipping up a design in photoshop - all very web 2.0, rounded corners and clean space, simple colour scheme (orange black and white) and from there it was on to actually building the thing.
With a quick stop to work through a Learning CSS book on the way, what you see above is pretty much the culmination. (The rounded corners are yet to come - they're much more fiddly than you would think).
Probably the most challenging part of the building process - after fracking around trying to find a colour combination that has sufficient colour and contrast difference to meet accessibility guidelines - has been ensuring cross browser compatibility.
I was a little surprised here to find that IE7 tended to display things much better than my much preferred Flock and Firefox. Most of the tweaking has been to get things positioned properly in the minority (but superior) browser. (Of course, my buttons display properly now in the Firefox family and are just a bit off in IE but it's all good)
Getting access to the web server will be the next challenge - apparently that presents a security risk. (Sigh).
