We’ve launched a great new website for Pioneer 90.1 Radio, the college radio station for Northland Community & Technical College that has campuses in East Grand Forks, MN and Thief River Falls, MN.

The radio station plays many types of music during all of their different programming, but is mostly an adult alternative station, with music from artists like Jack Johnson & Adele. They wanted the design to reflect this type of music but also be a bit edgy and modern to show that they are a college radio station.

The Website Design

Design Details

This clean and streamlined site has a ton of information that needed to be organized in a way that made it easy for users to find what they were looking for quickly and easily. We made sure to keep this in mind with the design so as to let the site be usable and relevant to its users. We also wanted to make it fun and a bit edgy so we used some great textures to enrich the design and give a radio-like feel including the dark speaker texture in the header and the brushed metal at the top and in the footer. A large on-air sign at the top adds a lively element to the design, and allows users to find what’s currently playing on the radio quickly. Red accents come from Northland’s school colors and add a nice pop of color to the color palette.

Great Extra Features

This site is rich with features that make it smart, elegant, and really fun for their users. Pioneer wanted the song currently playing on the radio to be shown on their site so users would always be in the know. They hooked up their feed with Spinitron, and we brought it on the site so you can now see what’s currently playing under the big on-air sign at the top. You can also see a list of Previously Played tracks in case you wanted to know the artist of one of the songs that just played recently. Another great feature is the Now Playing box on the homepage. This shows users which program is currently playing so they can tune in if one of their favorite DJ’s is on. You can also place a song request on the site, see some great blog posts from the station, and get all the information about upcoming events from Northland’s event feed.

The Logos

We also worked on the creation of their new Pioneer 90.1 logo. The logo needed to fall in step with Northland’s branding, including their “N” symbol and the Northland blue and red color scheme. We wanted the logo to be professional and versatile so that it could work for all of the different music that they play.

After creating the main station logo, we worked on logos for Pioneer HD-2 and HD-3, 2 HD stations that Pioneer runs. These needed to be similar but have their own identity to differentiate them from the main logo. So we used most of the Pioneer logo, and added the name of the station underneath as a tagline of sorts. The logos can be used in full as shown here, or with just the tagline part, as you can see on the homepage of the website.

Testimonial

Mark Johnson, Pioneer 90.1 Station Manager, had this to say about working with us:

Shannon is wonderful to work with. I’ve been very impressed with how quickly she responds to my questions about adding content and features to our new site. In the process, she’s taught me a lot about building a website. We’ve had a lot of complements about the design from our online listeners.

Thanks Mark! We enjoyed working with Pioneer 90.1 as well!

We love the way everything turned out and enjoyed putting it all together. Be sure to visit the website and let us know what you think of it in the comments below!