Re-launched CapitalFM.com
An all new Capital FM Network was launched on 3rd January this year. Simultaneously, an all-new CapitalFM.com went live.
Whilst the website is similar to it's predecessor (in fact, it's missing a few features that will come later) it's a massive leap forward for those stations that have been re-branded as Capital - Red Dragon FM, Leicester Sound, Ram FM, Trent FM and the former Galaxy stations.
The site's built on Global Radio's in-house CMS, 'Gusto' which, in turn, is built on the Django framework. A lot of the technical complexity is 'under the hood' - we invested of lot of time ensuring that a small editorial team had the power and flexibility to manage a site supporting nine different radio stations - a mammoth task. It's also been a key push to ensure that staff members beyond the core editorial team can contribute as frequently (or infrequently) as they wish - previous CMS systems have typically been an insurmountable barrier for inexperienced editorial contributors.
The front-end of the site is built on top of the Heart.co.uk code, with some enhancements to the localisation process (with added clickable map!) and some fundamental changes to how the content is managed - there's no more duplication of content on different URLs and users will d=find themselves rangin acros the whole site rather than being funnelled into a single location-specifc top-level category.
As far as the front end interface goes, one thing that I'm particularly happy with has been the commenting which has a slick javascript behaviour laid over the top of a solid (and SEO friendly) HTML structure. This is taking the lessons we learned from commenting on the old capitalfm.com, subsequently on bigtop40.com and taking that learning a little further.
I wanted to record the userXP for posterity, before some well-meaning project manager decides to 'monetize' commenting and damages the user XP. I could detail how it works with words, but a video is so much better...
VIDEO: Commenting on CapitalFM.com
See? 60 seconds footage says a thousand words.
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