A while ago, I wrote about Jack FM Oxfordshire‘s irritating habit of starting the live stream as soon as you visit their website.

However, on doing some research recently on radio players, I found it difficult on some websites to find that link to “listen”. The one I had most difficulty finding was Capital’s, bizarrely – it’s hardly hidden away, yet I found it hard to find – I think my eyeline instantly went to the black menu bar, and not the big arrow thing above it. Similarly, on Heart 106.2 it’s large, but not at first findable for me. Odd.

Anyway – kids station FUN Kids has recently updated its website, and they’ve an interesting idea: the “listen live” link follows you around. Visit and scroll about a bit, and see what I mean.

While the idea of something that sticks on the page like this isn’t new, the use of it was, I thought, quite neat. Now, I happen to believe it should be near the top, not the bottom, and it should be less hidden by the other stuff on the page – but the idea of always having a listen-live link on your website was quite a nice one. No matter wherever you are on the page, you’ll always find it.

“Listen live” appears now to be the UK standard wording for this type of link. Most links, but not all, are accompanied by a speaker icon to show that you’ll get some noise. For BBC national radio, they’re all in roughly the same place, though I think we could do a better job making them a little clearer; but the rest of the BBC’s radio services put them all over the place, as do commercial radio. It strikes me that we could do a lot worse than to aim for a standard way of doing a “listen live” link, so that whatever radio website you come to, you’ll know where to look.

Take a critical look of your site. Is it obvious enough?

It’s pretty important, after all…

Photo: Steve Rotman. Used under licence. For more, buy his book, Bay Area Graffiti

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