You’re excited. You have a great idea for a podcast, and maybe you already have some episodes recorded. You have an amazing lineup of guest speakers. You’re ready to roll!

Well, not quite yet. Before you go live, you’re going to need a site to put your podcast on. This will be the place that your listeners will go each week to hear what you have to say and, just as importantly, to share what you are saying with the world (or, rather, the part of the world in their own personal circles).

Even if you are uploading to iTunes, Stitcher and various other platforms, you’re going to need a website as your “home” on the Internet.

 

At Podcast Motors, we are happy to introduce ProCaster, a WordPress theme with everything you need for your podcast website. In case you were wondering which features you should be looking for in a podcast website platform, here are some of them:

A Great Color Scheme

If you’re choosing colors from scratch, it can be easy to create something that’s a bit jarring and, well, unattractive. Using a theme allows you to make tweaks, but it gives you a good starting point when it comes to using color.

If you are thinking about choosing your own colors, here’s a primer to making good choices by Website Builder Expert.

While you’re choosing your colors, keep in mind that using colorful visuals make it more likely that people will not only open up your content, but also that they’ll read or listen to it. Since you’re trying to get your readers to become your listeners, making the site visually attractive will encourage them to stick around long enough to hear what you and your guests have to say.

A Media Player That’s Easy on the Eyes

You’ve seen some ugly media players, and you surely don’t want one of them on your site. In addition to being unattractive, some media players are not simple and intuitive to use. What you want is a player that allows your listener to click a button and start listening.

Your player should also complement your website, so customization is key. If your site is done in soft pastels, you aren’t going to want a jarring shade of a primary color on your media player. Remember that while your listeners are there to hear your information, you need to appeal to their sense of sight, first.

Built-In Social Sharing

How many times have you wanted to share something on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ but haven’t wanted to click away from what you were doing to open a new tab, and you soon lost track of the thought? Probably too many times to count!

Having your social media sharing buttons right on your page and in each episode of your podcast makes it easy for people to share away.

A good podcast website will have these buttons in just the right places to encourage your listeners to share things they’ve heard on their social media sites.

Tweetable Quotes

Along the same lines, wouldn’t it be nice if some of your more memorable quotes were tweeted by others for posterity? You can nudge your listeners in the right direction with tweetable quote buttons.

All they need to do is click on the little blue bird, and your words (or the words of your guests) will be transported to the listener’s Twitter page.

Let’s face it: If you had to depend on people to pick out a quote from your podcast on their own and tweet it, it probably wouldn’t happen. With a tweetable quotes function built into your website, however, many of your listeners won’t be able to resist sharing your clever quips (that you choose yourself) with their circle of followers.

Email Lead Capture

Don’t you wish you could get the email addresses of all of the people who visit your page? While an email lead capture pop-up is not a guarantee (because some will click “no thanks”), it is a hassle-free way for people to leave their contact information.

Email is by far the best way for you to stay in touch with your listeners and readers. You can use email to send out updates and let your subscribers know when a new podcast has been uploaded. This has to be an opt-in service, and an email lead capture is the perfect way to collect the information you need.

Versatility

No matter which platform you’re using (Libsyn, Soundcloud, Blubrry), you are going to need for your media player to work with it. It’s best for the player to work with any platform without the need for customization; this is because you might decide to switch media hosts for one reason or another, and you aren’t going to want to have to go through the whole customization process again.

ProCaster’s media player works with any media host and doesn’t require any type of custom settings to do so. Just plug in your information and it will pick up your podcast without a problem.

Featured Images

Images make people want to click on what they’re accompanying, so the space for putting in feature images for each episode or post is a must. Ideally, this will be easy to do with your podcast website theme.

According to TreeFrog, 90% of the information our brains pick up is visual. You aren’t going to want to let the opportunity to capture your potential listeners’ attention, so choose a website theme that will allow for featured images on the main page to go along with every post.

Latest Episodes on Homepage

When your readers visit your homepage, it’s best to have the latest episodes in a grid on the front page itself. They might not want to go through pages of text and images trying to find an episode that looks interesting to them, and your latest podcast episode might not be the one they want to listen to first.

Having a neatly laid-out grid of episodes to choose from looks clean and attractive and also gives the reader the choice of what to open and listen to first.

Mobile-Friendly Design

If you have doubted whether mobile-friendly design for your site is optional, let us assure you right now that it is not. There are now more people using their mobile devices to access the Internet than there are people using desktop computers. These users require a mobile-optimized site so they look the way they are supposed to on smartphones and tablets.

If that is not enough to convince you, consider that one of the more recent Google updates from this past spring, aptly nicknamed “Mobilegeddon,” has made it pretty mandatory for website owners to make sure their sites are mobile-friendly if they want to see them in the first page of Google search results. If someone is looking for your podcast using their mobile browser using your keywords, you want to show up, right?

A mobile-optimized design is a must. You can do this yourself if you are good at coding or if you want to learn; there’s a Google course dedicated to teaching this very thing. Or you can just look for a website theme that will automatically handle this for you, like ProCaster does.

Are You Ready to Launch a New Podcast Site?

Choosing a website theme can be difficult, but Podcast Motors has been building podcast websites for almost 2 years now for dozens of high end online entrepreneurs, and has the experience and expertise you need to be confident that our product, ProCaster, will meet all of your podcast-website-related needs. No plug-ins or add-ons are required; once you download our theme, you are very close to having your site go live.

You can try out a free demo or download it now!