At the moment, I’m heavily involved with my local student radio station, Hub Radio, which is at the University of the West of England. I have been in many roles since joining the station in 2010, even taking on the Station Manager role for a period. I’m now currently the Operations Manager, second in command of the station and focus on keeping the station running.
Back in 2011, the Hub Radio website was quite basic and was more of a blog style site. I redesigned the whole website with a fresh looking WordPress template, as well as developing some wordpress plug-ins to interface with the scheduler and OCP now/next output. The result was the first of my designs for the Hub Radio website. The site had a more modern look, pages were up to date, and the home page had interchangeable widgets using the WordPress widget system. The template was labelled ‘version 2’, reflecting the fact that the site was still using the same WordPress system as before, just a different theme.
A later version, 2.1 was introduced to give a slightly darker tone and the ‘banner header’ was removed with a more simple design and simplified logo.
In 2012, the then station manager Kim Wells wanted to brighten up the site and make the website more interactive. Initially this was going to be done by someone else but ended up coming back to me. The template remained relatively the same however changes to the scheduling system and how shows are presented on the site was changed. The scheduling plugin in use was adapted and rewritten, resulting in RiotSchedule being born. Using what I had built in RiotSchedule, I was able to display shows live and coming up with images and descriptions on the homepage, and the show and schedule pages were easier to update for committee members and presenters. I also was able to use the APIs in RiotSchedule to update the RadioPlayer with live information.
Version 3 of the Hub website went live in January 2013.
In July 2013, a new brand and logo was developed with Sonny Panayotou. The website went under a facelift to incorporate the new logo, colour scheme and font. The site was also adapted to provide more information on the banner sliders and live shows have a bigger presence on the home page. The RadioPlayer was also updated with the new changes.
Visit the Hub Radio website by clicking here or navigating to http://www.hubradio.co.uk
Note: As of January 2014, I no longer maintain the website template but still actively develop the WordPress plugins in use including RiotSchedule.