Hailsham FM is operated by Hailsham FM Ltd., a not-for-profit company that holds a license to broadcast via OFCOM – allowing them to broadcast on 95.9FM from May 2018 to May 2023, inclusive.

The company is run by a voluntary board of directors, with each director responsible for overseeing an area of the station’s business.

This community radio station started in 2013 as FestivalFM, a temporary station to accompany the annual Hailsham Arts Festival. Since then it has obtained the broadcast licence and moved into dedicated broadcasting studios in the town centre. The station’s sound and feel are very different to other Commercial Radio stations.

The programme schedule was the trickest piece to work out. Finding an easy to use way to show all of the different shows on every day, where some shows only air once every 2 weeks, or once a month, required a timed schedule plugin. After lots of research and trials, we found something that would adapt for purpose. This also helped us to work out how to create the On Air Now slider panel at the top of the home page, another time sensitive schedule.

The client had to provide us with new suitable photographs of every presenter. We then converted them to black and white and cut out the background to create uniform identities for each presenter. These were adpated for the On Air Now panel, the Presenter Page (set up as a Blog format) and each individual presenters page (set up as Posts).

Plugins took some experimenting with, but we finally decided on The Events Calendar as a tidy way to present events – easy for the client to use with the option of upgrades for future functions such as ticket sales and a Community Calendar.

The National News Feed took some reseach but was relatively simple to create with a plugin. Once again we tried out several different plugins before deciding on the best option for the Radio Player button.

Animation was something that came up in conversations during meetings so we created an animated gif for the header panel suggestive of radio waves.

Once we had all of the information from the client, it was then a case of time spent populating the site before final amendments and launch.

 

 

 

A consistently branded site which immediately says “RADIO”.  All functionalities run smoothly with individual elements easy for the client to update following the training session.

We assisted the client with obtaining new domain names and transferring the exsiting one. We could also advise about creating email accounts to the presenters.

Visit the website and have a look for yourself: www.hailshamfm.com