LDC Radio: the site you’re on

A radio station’s website has one job above all the others: get people listening. Someone who hears about a show, a DJ or the station should be able to land on any page and press play. The station is on 97.8 FM, licensed for the City of Leeds, on DAB in Leeds & Bradford, and online, on the app and on Alexa, and the site has to point people to all of them.

Around that, it has to keep pace with a station that changes every week. Shows move, presenters join, mixes go up and local events come and go. A site that relied on someone updating it by hand would always be behind. And because the old site had years of links pointing at it from posts, listings and other websites, the move could not be allowed to break them.

The live player sits in the header and the hero of every page, next to an ‘on air now, up next’ strip that links to the full schedule. A ‘Message the studio’ button sends shout-outs and requests.

Behind that are pages for every show and every DJ, with bios and photos the presenters look after themselves in LDC One. Hundreds of listen-again mixes, genre pages and genre charts sit alongside local dance events in Leeds and Bradford, local news, and Yorkshire guides to nightlife, eating out, cafes, things to do and ways to get involved. Site search runs across shows, DJs, events, mixes and news.

The station’s commercial pages are part of the same build: advertising with audience figures and an enquiry form, a DJ hire enquiry form, a newsletter sign-up and a page about supporting LDC.

None of the shows, DJs or events are typed into the website. They arrive through the content API of LDC One, so the site shows the same records the station team works in, and when a show changes there the website follows on its own.

The logo comes in light and dark versions, and any page without its own photo gets a generated share image, while shows, DJs and mixes use their own pictures. On a phone the layout rearranges itself, with a stacked hero, a full-width on-air block and full-width buttons, instead of shrinking the desktop page.

More than a thousand pages are listed in the XML sitemap, and robots.txt lets search engines, AI crawlers included, read everything except the site’s API. Structured data on every page describes the station and its 97.8 FM frequency, and each kind of page adds its own: shows, episodes, DJs, mixes, events, the schedule, FAQs and news. Canonical tags and full Open Graph sharing tags run throughout.

The move off WordPress was handled address by address. Hundreds of old URLs, many of them recovered from the Wayback Machine, now send visitors and search engines to their new pages with permanent redirects, and sections that no longer exist are marked as gone rather than left to error.

Press play in the header, check what’s on now and next, or browse the shows, the DJs, the mixes and the events. Then view the page source of any of them to see the structured data described above.