Building a simple website for your podcast has never been easier! With Captivate's built-in website tools, you'll be live in no time!
This help article contains an overview of how to create your podcast website with Captivate.
We also have a deep-dive series to help you if you'd like more step-by-step options:
Captivate Site tutorial overview
Captivate has been built to work beautifully with Podcast Websites, the world's #1 managed WordPress service for podcasters and of course, with WordPress itself via Captivate Sync™. Captivate can also be used wonderfully with other website platforms by using the Captivate embeddable podcast player.
But, when you launch your podcast very often you need something simple, something effective and something to showcase your show.
That's why with every podcast hosted using Captivate, you'll enjoy a completely free podcast website that is easy to use and looks stunning on any device.
Plus, we're always adding new features and designs for you to customize your site with!
Configuring your free Captivate Site
To access your Captivate Site settings:
Sign in to your Captivate dashboard
Choose Captivate Sites from the left-side navigation
You'll then see six tabs that allow you to quickly and easily setup your Captivate Site:
Basic Settings
Header
Team
Email Opt-in
SEO & Sharing
Advanced
Basic Settings
This tab contains the base settings for your website:
Site Layout - choose from three awesome templates
Domain configuration - Turn this on if you'd like to use your own domain name rather than the built-in Captivate domain name. Learn about this here.
Website colors:
- Body: The main color for your website background. Captivate will intelligently use this to set certain section colors, too.
- Header: The color of your website's header.
- Footer: The color of your website's footer.
- Highlight: The color of highlights and certain interactive elements on your website.
- Header font: The text color for your header area.
- Footer font: The text color within your website's footer.
- Listen highlight: The highlight colour for the listen section of your website.
- Listen background: The background colour for the listen section of your website.
- About highlight: The highlight colour for the about section of your website.
- About background: The background colour for the about section of your website.Episode display order - choose whether to show the oldest or newest episode first
Note: Listen Highlight, Listen Background, About Highlight, and About Background options are only available on the default Site Theme 1.
Header
Your website header sits atop your website and contains some pretty standard information, including your podcast's social icons which are pulled in automatically from your marketing suite. Learn about that here.
Customization options for your header are:
Logo - Your brand logo. Sure, you can use your podcast cover art but an actual logo for your podcast's brand is better!
Title - Text that will display where your logo should be, if you don't use a logo.
Fixed header - If you choose this, your website header will shrink a little and stick to the top of your website for your listeners.
Enable hero section - Choose whether or not to show the nice big hero image section at the top of your website.
Hero image - A really nice big, bold image for the background of the "intro" section of your website.
Overlay - Some hero images don't do too well with text over the top of them, so you can add an overlay here to make sure that any text you place in to and is nicely legible.
Hero title - A welcome message for your listeners, be nice :) This won't show if left blank.
Hero subtitle - Something descriptive and welcoming as a follow up to your . This won't show if left blank.
Podchaser rating - Encourage your listeners to review your show on Podchaser, and display these ratings on your Captivate Site!
Team
Decide whether to showcase your podcast team or certain members of the team by clicking their profile card.
When added, drag and drop your team members into your desired order for display on your website.
Monetization
If you have our Tips feature enabled, you can highlight your supporters on your Captivate Site. This shows the most recent tips, and you can customize that section with a title, intro text (to encourage other supporters), and what the text says on your call to action button so listeners can click through to your Tips page.
Email Opt-In
Easily add an email newsletter form to your Captivate Site with our AWeber and Mailchimp direct integration, as well as support for HTML embed code for other newsletter providers!
Email provider - choose your email integration from AWeber, Mailchimp, or HTML form
Settings - optimize your email form with an enticing title and description
Email image - use am eye-catching image to draw attention to your form
SEO & Sharing
Here is where you can validate your website with search engines - we're always expanding this section, too to stay up-to-date!
Website Meta - Optimize your Captivate Site with its own SEO Title and Description
SEO and Analytics Settings - Measure the traffic and visitor behaviour to your Captivate Site, with easy-to-implement measurement tools:
Google verification - Your Google verification meta tag.
Google Analytics - Your Google Analytics tracking code.
Facebook Tracking Pixel - Track how effective your paid ads are on Facebook
Social sharing image - A 1200px wide by 628px high image, ideally a .png file to avoid social media compression on Facebook, used within previews of your website on social media.
Advanced
If you ever need to move your podcast from your free Captivate Site to a self-hosted site, or you want to share some Captivate love, this section is for you.
Domain Redirect - Set up a 302 redirect to your own website, to ensure Google and other search engines know where to send web traffic
Share the love - Show the Captivate logo with a link to Captivate (or your affiliate link) in your website footer.
Recommended Reading: The Captivate Podcast Marketing Suite Overview