WMUL-FM launched its new website on Monday afternoon, after several months of development. The change, which makes the station’s site part of Marshall University’s WordPress system, has given the site a fresh look after having roughly the same layout since 2008. In addition to the new look on the outside, moving to a WordPress-based website has streamlined the process of updating the site.
Immediate-past Online Director Braxton Crisp, who tackled the project of migrating content from the previous design over to WordPress, said the move accomplishes more than just giving a new look to the station’s online presence.
“When considering moving to WordPress, the discussions I had with Executive Director Adam Rogers and Faculty Manager Dr. Charles Bailey were about improving aesthetics of the site, without sacrificing content prominence,” Crisp said. “We obviously wanted to keep it easy for our visitors to get the latest news and sports coverage, plus be able to listen to our 24/7 live stream right from the home page. I feel comfortable in saying that we’ve retained all the functionality we wanted to while gaining the clean look of the university’s WordPress layout.”
Rogers said he was not entirely sold on changing over to WordPress, but after seeing how everything looks and using the improved back-end functionality, he is glad the change was made.
“We have won multiple awards in the last couple of years for our website, so I wasn’t sure that scrapping that was the best idea, but now I’m fully convinced that the new site will keep visitors coming back,” Rogers said. “Plus, it allows for staff members at WMUL-FM with just novice web development experience to be valuable in maintaining the site with fresh content, whereas before you had to know how to write multiple programming languages. Overall, it’s a great change for the station and we’re definitely starting off the new semester with a bang.”
WMUL-FM can still be found on the Worldwide Web at the same address, www.marshall.edu/wmul, however, any bookmarks you may have for streaming pages or your favorite podcast programs will no longer work.