A generic website builder does not know your station is on air
You can build a radio station website on any of the big site builders. Thousands of stations have. What none of them can do is know what is playing right now.
So the now-playing box gets wired up by hand to a third-party widget. The schedule page is typed in and goes stale the week a show moves. The presenter pages are maintained separately from the presenters in the automation. The podcast page is a list of links somebody remembers to update. Every one of those is a small manual job that exists purely because the website and the station are two different systems.
In AirWaves they are one system. The site is part of the platform that runs your air, so what is playing, what is scheduled, who is on and what has been published are already known. The website stops being a thing you maintain and becomes a view of a station that is already running.
A builder, not a template you fill in
The element palette is on the left and the live preview is on the right. Drag an element onto the page, click it to open its settings, and what you build is what publishes. Start from a station template if you want a head start, then own every colour, logo, font and layout on it.
- True drag-and-drop with separate desktop and mobile views and one-click publish
- Multi-page, three-column layouts that are fully responsive and stack cleanly on a phone
- Full version history with instant rollback — publish confidently, because undoing a bad Friday afternoon is one click
- Your own domain — point it at the site and go live
The elements are the ones radio actually needs
This is where a builder made for broadcasters stops resembling a general-purpose one. These are not plugins bolted on; they are elements in the palette, and they read from the station.
- Now playing with artwork, and recently played — read from the air chain rather than guessed at by a third-party scraper
- The schedule and the presenters — one place to change who is on, rather than two
- Dedications and requests that come back into the station instead of into an inbox nobody reads
- Top-chart voting — listeners vote on the site and the result is data the station can act on
- Podcasts and events, published from the same platform that produced them
- News, weather and sports blocks, served through the station rather than pasted in
The site, the player and the advertising are the same conversation
A radio website is not a brochure. It is where the stream is listened to and where digital inventory is delivered, and separating those from the site is what makes them hard.
The AirWaves player is a docked bar that keeps playing across every page a listener visits, carries VAST pre-roll ad insertion, and shows the current track with artwork fetched automatically. Now Playing reads real-time metadata from the stream itself, so it does not sit lying about the song through an ad break.
Because the same platform bills your on-air advertising, digital inventory sold against that player is not a separate system with a separate report. That is a hard thing to bolt on afterwards and a natural one when the site, the stream and the traffic system share a database.
And the app, from the same layout thinking
A station app is the same problem again: an audience surface that needs to know what the station is doing. AirWaves builds those too, from a drag-and-drop layout defined per station, with widgets served from the platform — including weather and news proxied through the station rather than each app calling third-party APIs with keys in it.
Listeners messaging the station from the app land in the same place as text messages, so the studio has one inbox rather than one per platform.
What to ask any radio website vendor
If you are comparing options — including this one — these are the questions that separate them.
- Where does now playing come from? If the answer is a third-party widget polling a stream, expect it to be wrong during ad breaks and absent during live shows.
- Who maintains the schedule and presenter pages? If the website has its own copy, somebody is keeping two lists in step forever.
- Does the player survive navigation? A player that stops when a listener clicks a link is a listening-hours problem, not a design one.
- Can you sell against the player? Digital pre-roll is inventory. If it is not in the same traffic system, it is not in the same report either.
- Can you roll back a bad publish? Version history is boring until the afternoon you need it.
Radio website hosting, answered
It is hosting plus the parts a radio station website needs that a general web host has no concept of: a live now-playing display, a schedule, presenter pages, a persistent stream player, podcasts, dedications and requests. Generic hosting gives you the server and leaves the radio-specific parts to you or to third-party widgets. AirWaves hosts the site as part of the platform that runs the station, so those parts are fed by the station itself.
No. Like every AirWaves module, Sites runs standalone and works alongside the automation you already own. You get the most out of it when the station data comes from the same platform — now playing, schedule and presenters populate themselves — but the builder, the hosting, the player and the podcast and event publishing all work regardless of what is driving your air chain.
Yes. Build the site, publish it, and point your own domain at it. Nothing about the site has to live on a subdomain of somebody else’s brand.
Yes, and it reads real-time metadata from the stream rather than from a schedule guess, so it does not keep displaying a song through a commercial break. Album artwork is fetched automatically, and recently-played is available alongside it.
Yes. The persistent player carries VAST pre-roll ad insertion, and because AirWaves also runs your traffic and billing, digital inventory sold against it lives in the same system as your on-air inventory rather than in a separate platform with its own reporting.
Roll it back. The builder keeps full version history and restores a previous version instantly, so publishing is not a decision that has to be made carefully at five o’clock on a Friday.
Yes. The station app is built from a drag-and-drop layout in the same way the website is, with widgets served from the platform — including weather and news proxied through the station rather than each app holding third-party API keys. Listener messages sent from the app arrive in the same inbox as texts to the studio.
Explore the rest of the platform
Every AirWaves module shares one engine, one database and one login — and every one of them also runs standalone against the automation system you already own.
See your station’s site build itself
Book a walkthrough with an engineer who has actually run a radio station, or call 1-877-224-1656. No bots, no phone tree.