Republic Radio: a great radio station with a bad website

There is a Greek radio producer, N. Komninos, whose shows are truly fascinating because of the great music he plays. By the time I ‘ve heard he was going to manage his own radio station I was excited. I can’t say the same about the website of the station which offers much less than it promises. The poor content is the main problem. There are also some more issues which make the whole experience even worse.

Design issues

Well I can see why there ‘s so much yellow everywhere. It’s part of the concept and I accept that. However, it is problematic when you stay at the page more than than a minute or so.

Navigating in this page is a problem too, not because of the shape or style of the icons but because you need to guess their meaning. So we have beautiful but not usable icons. What’s more important? You guess.

There is also this Flash thing. Actually, only the navigation system takes advantage of Flash capabilities. At the same time the website remains inaccessible, there are certain SEO issues, the website is difficult to be updated etc. So here it comes the usual question: did they really need Flash?

Content issues

All of the above could (?) be ignored if there was some content in this website. Because there isn’t. The only real info you can take is the program of the radio and the online radio link. Except for it affords only Windows users. I definitely don’t care about this silly ping pong game. If I wanted to play ping pong online, I would have visited a relevant, not a radio station, website.

In other words it is obvious that real content has been replaced by not important content. A wallpaper is a good gig, nothing more. There can’t be as important as the news of the radio station. Dj picks (a list of songs picked by each producer) could be shown beside each name at the program list. There is no reason to occupy a place of something more important in the menu.

All in all we come back to the same old thing: content is the king and without content there can’t be a king. Yes, the designer of the website approached it a way I wouldn’t. He could have done more (or less - it depends on the side of the coin you choose). However, people who thought and decided the content of this website made the real mistake. I wonder how often they visit it or how eager they are to visit it.

A book with no pages

The polished front page hides a book with no pages. I am pretty sure that if someone had made a simple usability test all of the previously mentioned problems would have been revealed. I can’t see why a user could stay there more than 30”.

It is not hard to think how easily this website could become more useful for its visitors. It ‘s a petty such a good radio station does not have a website it deserves, that’s all.