Background
WSUM is a student radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In my sophomore year of college, I joined as a member and soon after got the opportunity to work on the Web Team hosted by the Web Director at the time. The Web Director's focus was to migrate the website from it's original Wordpress environment to React to speed up website performance and allow for easier future development. I aided by creating the website designs in Figma and its conversion into code. In my senior year, I was fortunate enough to take on the role of Web Director which gave me the means to invest more time in the website's completion.
The Problem
The original WSUM website did not align with the new station's theming. Additionally, station members complained about the confusing layout, cluttered content, and difficulty finding how to listen to the live stream.
Original website
New logo
First Prototypes
The first prototype was created by the Web Director at the time, who tied in feedback from executive staff meetings. It served as a great reference point for the layout requirements. The main goals were to provide a clear incentive for playing the live stream, easier navigation for the blog, and more engagement for external media WSUM has to offer.
I expanded upon this initial prototype by tying in the new iconic purple color of WSUM. I also added better affordances for the live stream by moving the now-playing details to an interactive footer player with the visual cues of the current song playing. A search feature also felt necessary to encourage blog discovery.
First Launch
The first version of the new website launched in 2024, with minor style revisions from the initial prototype. Some highlights include the blog page, which changed to a card-style component. Two new streams were added so that users could navigate between on-air FM stream and the alternative online-only streams.
Second Launch (Final)
The second launch came when I became the Web Director my senior year. It had been around a year since the initial launch, which gave me plenty of time to reflect on my designs and use my newly learned design practices from classes. I also had the chance to collaborate with a station member on the design for the podcast page. The biggest changes I added were replacing the font with one that's more readable and making a new layout for the home and podcast page.
Results
The new website design garnered great results for station engagement. The number of users increased by 72% (up 16k people) and engagement time increased by 186%.
Stats since website launch (Sep 2024 - Sep 2025)