How to Make A Good Podcast Website

We recently did a total redesign of our website, here’s how we thought through it.

TL;DR:

The most common website builders end up causing too much unnecessary work to maintain your library of content
Notion allows you to plan, collaborate, and create your content - and you can also make the content into a web page with a click of a button

I’ve been designing websites for over a decade. I’ve done a number of different projects from small businesses to personal portfolios to non profits. Hands down, the hardest website to figure out how to do right was my own podcast’s website, this site you’re on right now.

Branding Deep Dive Website V1

I initially created the Branding Deep Dive website on Squarespace. Squarespace is my go to website creator for static websites. Its easy to use and its set it and forget it. For example, if you’ own a a brick and mortar business that just needs to have a web presnce so people find them in google, I can create a website in a weekend and hand it over to you without the need to do any maintenance.

When I started playing around with websites, I started with wordpress. I’ve used a few different CMS’s and website editors, but handing off the website to the client was so much easier with Squarespace than any other service. So eventually I started building exclusively on Squarespace.

So when it came time to create a website for my podcast, naturally I used Squarespace. I found a template that I liked and I was off adding my library of episodes into the Squarespace editor.

The Problem with Squarespace

For a small static website, Squarespace makes a lot of sense. But when you have to add a catalog of over 50 podcast episodes and each episode has a summary, key takeaways, links to youtube/Apple Podcasts/Spotify, and a full episode transcript, things can get a bit ugly.

I had to create 50 separate pages, upload pictures, and the worst part - copy, paste, and reformat a TON of text for each episode. I quickly got very tired of doing all this work just to add the podcast episode to my website, but I didn’t want to hire someone just to copy and paste a bunch of text for every episode.

There had to be a better way.

I went back to the drawing board…

The Elements of a Good Podcast Website

To make the decision of which website platform I should be using, I had to understand both the elements of a good podcast website and the pain points that I had in my current process. After doing some research, I found that the best podcast websites that I had seen had the following elements:

The catalog of episodes was searchable
Podcast starter packs - episodes categorized by topic so people could jump into what they liked instead of trying to find the episodes they liked
Each podcast episode page had the following:

Episode summary
Full episode transcript
Links to other platforms
Links to related content

And here were my pain points:

Too much time spent copying, pasting, and reformatting content on the website
Too hard for users to find the content they wanted

The Solution?

Turns out the perfect solution to our problems was right under our noses! We had been using Notion to plan podcast episodes, write scripts for video essays, and collaborate at each step of the process up until the product was done. Why couldn’t we just use Notion for our website? We could greatly reduce the amount of time spent copying and pasting by switching to notion.

Turns out, we could switch to notion. And we did.

This was the best move we’ve ever made. Not only does it meet all the criteria listed above for a good podcast site, but it also answers all the pain points listed above with normal website editors as well.