A ScreamDesign Publication
|
|
|
|
|
||
| |
||
| Home | Advertise | ScreamDesign | Feedback | Contribute | ||
|
|
|
Designing for Web Radio
Microsoft Case Heads to Supreme Court Barnes
& Noble Offers MP3.com
Forms Retail
|
Designing for Web Radio Interview by Robert O'Malley Stephen Moulton is senior vice-president of design and new media at BroadcastAmerica.com in Portland, Maine. Moulton studied at the Parsons School of Design and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Prior to working at BroadcastAmerica.com, Moulton ran his own video production and web development company. He recently spoke to Robert O'Malley about the design of the BroadcastAmerica.com web site, which provides access to radio and television broadcasts from around the world. We thought about some of the more successful companies such as Yahoo! and CNET. Their sites are huge and have tons of information, but it's all within a consistent design and a consistent navigation interface, so that the visitor doesn't constantly have to find out if the web site works. While design was important to that initial launch, it was much more important that we got all the components in place and lay some real groundwork. We wanted to show a lot of content so people don't just go, "Well this is okay," and then just leave the site. We want them to think: "I have not seen the half of this. Secondly, we repeat information. You might be able to find "Star Interviews" at two locations on the music page. Broadcast America has everything within the same site. One concept that has been with us since the very beginning was "one to three clicks and you're listening." That way you're not clicking and clicking and clicking. We want people to be listening as soon as possible. We want to get them to their content as quickly as possible because they are going to have to listen to a video ad or a radio ad prior to that. The content and the number of styles of the different kinds of content - from television news to movies - keeps growing. Not only do we have different genres but we also have different cultures of music. So the design has to be very expandable and that's what I've been focusing on over the last five months prior to the launch. The Web site and all the players on the web site are heavily back-ended. They're all automatically generated. When you click "listen," a player is generated. When you click "go to this page," that page is automatically generated. Everything is auto-generated. And anytime you make a web site that intelligent it takes a lot of R&D to pull that together. The site is dynamic and designed so it can handle anything. And that's all in the backend. There's a Talk Radio Network 1 and Talk Radio Network 2 and both of those have 24-hour schedules. They change them on a dime. We can change that schedule so quickly. And it's not changed by tech people. Why waste their time with a stupid change like that? This is now handled by our customer service and tech-help people. They go into our backend database and they just retype it. We have a MySQL database. Anyone who looks closely will notice that all of our HTML files are actually PHTML files. We just made that up because we have a custom-designed server that knows how to assemble these pages based on different criteria. That was all designed and programmed in-house by our programmers. It's all proprietary. It knows exactly how to handle our content. We run all of our video and audio as SureStream except for a few instances when the broadcaster or contractor of a show might say, "No we want this and nothing but this." But we try to run it at 56K Real SureStream. With Windows Media we're running it at just 20K. Some of our talk shows have requested that we run them at a single-bit rate of 8.5K per second because there's no music involved. SureStream runs at a variable rate. If you've got a 56K modem and get a good connection at the outset but all of a sudden you lose a little bandwidth and can only be served at 22K per second, SureStream will automatically shift to a version encoded at 20K. The quality will diminish but it won't stop. The RealNetworks came out with that product a little too early and throughout 1999 we had a real horror show of a time working with it. It wasn't working correctly. They just came out with a final version - Real Player 7 - which is working flawlessly for our visitors. In our engineering-manufacturing department we build our own custom computers - our encoder boxes - from scratch. And those are sent out to the station upon receiving notification that Sprint or MCI has hooked up the frame-relay connection in the studio. We install a partial T1 line and, depending on what we're broadcasting, either a 64K-frame relay or a 128K frame relay. It could be more in the case of some of our TV news shows. Then a regular computer arrives at their station and they plug a little mini jack from their broadcast signal into the back of the computer; then they plug the computer in, snap in a little ethernet connector to the frame-relay connection, and notify us. When that happens we're able to dial right into that box through that frame relay and just get it up and running. We talk with the engineer and maybe tell him we need a little more audio compression to make the signal sound better or we need to bring the signal up or down a little bit. In most of our stations, the frame relay goes from their station to Real Broadcast Networks. From there it's propagated to their servers around the world and out to the masses. Designing the site Since the launch of this I have begun redesigning the site and bringing in more information. I will never be satisfied, which I think is a good thing. My own worst critic is myself. So I feel we've made great strides in finding this new structure with all the templates and the fact that they're so dynamic. Anyone can throw any content at us now and we can plug it in and not mess things up and have it become degraded. The background color is an extremely bold choice. On some monitors it comes up very dark. It's actually a dark gray background with lines in it. I hate it when it comes up looking very black. But, hey, you can't satisfy every system out there. You've got to try to hit the middle road. I think younger people think it looks great and think it's cool. We're not like an MP3 site where we're catering to 14 to 22 year olds. We're a site that's launching Broadcast Bible. Unlike some of our competitors, my challenge here is to create a web site that is just as appealing to a 14-year-old as it is to an 85-year-old. That is the challenge. So while I can be cool and groovy to a degree with a graphic or snazzy little curves here and there, you've got to realize that over at the left under live music radio there is also a spiritual channel; there's classical, there's jazz. And I don't take that as, "Oh my god! So now I have to create this really bland web site." We've also gotten into some dynamic layered HTML with JavaScript. That little slider bar in Music Highlights has dynamic layers. We already know there are problems with it on the beta version of IE and Netscape 6. It was a total disaster with this web site. It all falls to pieces because they've changed the coding. You can imagine all the work that goes into testing every browser that's ever been made. We draw the line at 4.0 browsers. We do not try to satisfy a browser for IE or Netscape prior to 4.0. Using Flash I'm ready to make the choice to take this site to almost 75 to 80 percent Flash. The links will be flash; the menus will be flash rather than the dynamic stuff. We've been doing a lot of background research on Flash to see how installed it is. I'm very pleased. It's more installed than even the Real Player is installed. I believe the Real Player came up like 52 percent. Flash is anywhere from 89 to 98 percent. We got this from the Standard.com, We don't want to do a whole lot of animation on the site. It's more just making the navigation clean and well balanced. Now that we've got all this content we're ready to start selling advertising. That's where the motion is going to happen. The ads are going to happen at the top part of the web site. Some things are going to be moved up and down and all around to facilitate getting those ads into place. There's going to be enough motion with those little flashy animated GIFs. We have total control when we say Flash. If we make the links Flash graphics, we don't have the problem of fonts getting out of control and looking a different way or looking too big to fit a certain location. We're not talking about Flash that stretches when you make the window bigger. It will be an absolute size. We know that on every computer in the world it looks exactly the same way. We want to be able to create these unusual areas, these components. That's why it's very important to have something like that little loop area with a really snazzy graphic. That kind of breaks things up and gives your eyes something to rest on for a while. Companies that are most successful out there, such as Yahoo! or AOL or CNET keep their web sites very bare bones. Yahoo! is the best example. I think everyone just laughs about it. They've become the most successful, but they've always had the driest web sites in the world. They're also the most successful in the world at what they do. To my mind, they'll be even more successful if they put a little more eye candy there to break stuff up. They're doing a wee bit of that right now. And then you have your super fantasmo Flash web sites that are so astounding. We had done that. We had a site called Newscast Now that used to handle TV news. It's now under BroadcastAmerica.com. It was an epic Flash site, beautiful montagey things floating all over the place. Flash is great when you do things that are cool, but you can't throw up a lot of content and let people see a lot of content if you do one of these gorgeous montage sites. When I say I'm looking to do Flash later on, I mean it's going to be what I call component Flash - little tiny components of Flash rather than a big big Flash web site with all this animated stuff. It conflicts with content. And it's not just Flash. There are sites where you get a huge picture and it's all beautiful and montagey and wicked cool. We all love that; all my designers love it. We love to go to web sites and go, "Wow! Isn't that cool." But the next question is, How long do you stay at that web site? You stay there for enough time to look at the graphic and see what the graphic does and then you're, "Oh well, I'm gone!" Because there's nothing else to do there. Coca-Cola - and believe me they do a wonderful job - has a Flash web site and it does just what it should for their business. They have basically one product to sell and that is Coke. And their web site is Flash. It is gorgeous and we wish we could do that but we can't; we've got hundreds and hundreds, literally thousands of strains to manage that we must get to the public. We have to make it easy for them to get to it and make sure that it's working across the board under different computer platforms, from PC to Mac to Linux, and from Netscape to IE to AOL to web TV. We have to check all that stuff. We're the ones doing it, making sure a site is holding up and that our player is holding up. I feel I'm getting better at it. My entire team of people is just becoming so much more knowledgeable as time goes by. |
|
||||
