You told us you couldn’t navigate our website (wortfm.org) very well from your smartphone or tablet. That it was difficult to find what you were looking for on our website. You wanted to subscribe to podcasts of WORT shows. You wanted more information about local news and music. In addition to giving us this important feedback, you gave us one more thing: the financial support we needed to do something about it.
With your support we hired a web director, Tim Schneider, and this past summer he joined WORT volunteers and staff from the IT department to get down to some serious techie business.
They worked smart. They started with a solid foundation, a platform called WordPress. WordPress is Open Source, meaning that it is FREE and there are hundreds of developers constantly working on it; a community willing to answer common questions. It’s also an easy program to teach the many volunteers who write and post articles to our site.
They worked fast. They used pre-built features when it made sense, cutting down on the number of staff and volunteer hours. The donation area of the website, for instance, is a traditional eCommerce add-on that was repurposed for donations. It took far fewer hours to set this up than to build it from scratch. It allows WORT to process online donations faster and without errors, giving you a much better experience while saving staff and volunteer time.
They worked hard to offer you a new way to connect to our content. They began with one podcast.
(A podcast is an audio series that you can subscribe to). Our most popular podcasts are Radio Astronomy, Mel & Floyd, Madison History Podcast, and This Is What I Ate.
If you haven’t heard our podcasts, you can check them out on our website (wortfm.org). Find and click the blue bar that says Podcasts on the WORT front page.
If you want to read about or listen to older versions of a particular show, click on the black title at the top of the podcast (e.g., Sara’s Table) and you’ll be taken to a page with past episodes and short summaries.
Don’t want to miss episodes? Subscribe and have them delivered to your email: click the blue Podcast button on the front page of our website. On the podcast page, click one of the four icons to the right of the show name. Each icon represents a different service that offers our podcasts for free. If you already have iTunes, just hit the Apple symbol and it takes you directly to a list of our podcasts. Hit the blue subscribe button and you’re done!
From great new features to streamlined functions, we want your experience with our website to be as great as your WORT listening experience. Your support helped us grow our online presence and reach places beyond our traditional radio signal. We want to continue to improve. What can we do to make our website better? Send your suggestions or questions to Tim Schneider, webdirector@wortfm.org, or call (608) 256-2001.
