Site Design and Paypal Mayhem | Web Creation Week 5
This week we explored the design and aspects of our sites, and dove deeper into linking payments through paypal. The amount of effort that goes into a checkout process on a site will leave me forever scarred and definitely looking into hiring a web designer when I can afford one.
I analyzed the Dear Media production site and one of their individual podcasts under their umbrella “What We Said” to get a fresher idea on what I would be looking for to incorporate into my own site. Right now, this is that site! Here are a few notes taken throughout this weeks assignments.
Reviewing Other Sites
What We Said has their website as an extension to dearmedia.com, so I'd like to look over both their main website Dearmedia and the WhatWeSaid podcast extension site as both have important benefactors I think are worth adding.
For starters, there is a bright red button on the top right corner of the Dear media site to send one to the shopping area to purchase merchandise from the dear media productions. The merchandise includes
Gift cards
Hoodies & hats, Crew neck long sleeves,
Pajama and tea set bundle
Mugs
Totes
Beach Towels
Beanies
Sweatpants
Phone cases.
Returning to Dear Media's home page, they immediately have a "listen now" button front and center, with the title "Highly crafted, compelling voices. Experience Dear Media." I absolutely love this, as it is eye-catching and immediately sets the tone for the rest of the site. Scrolling down they have their podcasts featured, I think I would go so far as to feature specific episodes of my own podcast that have the biggest view rates in that area if I were to mimic this site. Scrolling further down is their about us section, which I would remove or stick further down. Then their latest on the blog section, then followed with their subscribe to dear media email newsletter.
Lastly at the bottom they have their link to their socials and a list of where their shows are available.
To the left is a clickable pullout list that features all of the same information, but in a neater format. Including more digital media links to follow, which I'm interested in why these digital links weren't featured in the overall page.
I think that their advertisement, shop, about, shows, and contact would be important pages to incorporate into my website but altogether I think that the pages I want for my site would be..
Main landing page
Blog page
Shop page
Episodes page
Digital Portfolio page
About us page
Heading over to What We Said, the podcast ran by Dear Media individually, in the top right is the shopping cart again. There's a banner to get a percentage off of merchandise at the top of the site. And to the bottom left is another banner that says to get 10% off. I'm curious as to how to get banners like that. The design on this site is very poor and amateur compared to the other one. But saying that it looks like it's just a merchandise site, so What We Said doesn't have any further information other than the two paragraphs about the podcast, and the merchandise linked below. I think this is a great example of what not to do for a podcast, as there are no links to the podcast, no further information, no links to socials, etc. There would be no way to find the podcast by stumbling onto the site.
One thing to incorporate there is to make sure every bit of information and product functions like a circle. The podcast leads to the site and the site leads to the podcast. The merch leads to the podcast which leads to the site which leads to the newsletter.. so on and so forth.
…
Links to each site
Dearmedia
https://shop.dearmedia.com/collections/whatwesaid
WhatWeSaid
Bonus blog post I found
https://dearmedia.com/podcast-website-examples/
My Rodeo With Setting Up A Paypal Button
For my website, I am setting up benefits to mimic a patreon account, with tiers of memberships to mimic a "pay what you can."
The first thing I experienced, was how many times I timed out while I was thinking of names for the tiers :D. So it's definitely good to do the thinking before entering all of the information down!
Each tier will receive the same amount of benefits, but is a gentle way to let a member pay it forward with what they can afford for the time being. I kept it to $1, $5, $10, and for me it was nice that paypal could provide this feature. So personally, using paypal worked out in my favor, but I do wonder if paypal is the best option for future consumers as more and more people are switching to other platforms like Venmo to make payments.
Is it beneficial to stick to paypal? Should one focus on newer platforms? To be continued…