We all know how important it is to make it easy for listeners to actually listen to your podcast. After all, not everyone likes having yet more apps on their phone.
That's why we created Captivate Sites - to offer a simple, easy, and beautiful way to promote your show as well as grow your listeners.
Every Captivate customer gets a free website and all the cool features that comes with it, including email sign-up forms, custom domains, Google Analytics, and more.
The best part? Setting up your Captivate Website is super easy!
This tutorial covers your Captivate Sites' basic settings, where you'll choose the layout, colour scheme and episode settings for your website.
Setting Up Your Captivate Website
When you're logged in to your Captivate dashboard, click on Captivate Sites in the left hand navigation menu. This will open up the Captivate Sites settings.
Make sure the toggle is switched to On, which will open up the various design options, and then click Save Changes.
The first thing you'll notice are the six options available to you for customizing your site. Each option gives you the ability to customize your site, and choose what features your listeners will see. Let's start with Basic Settings.
Basic Settings
You'll see that here you can choose from the following:
Site layout
Domain configuration
Website colors
Episode display order
We've made it super easy to change these settings, so let's dig in! π
Site layout
Currently, you can choose from three pre-made templates for your Captivate Website.
Standard: our default Captivate Website design, and features a large hero image header, 5 latest episodes, a section where listeners can find your show, and an About the show section as well as an About your hosts section.
Sidebar: similar to the Standard design, Sidebar keeps your episodes top of mind, with some extra show notes being visible, as well as moves the About description and where to listen to your show into a sidebar section, making them more visible.
Central: taking a more minimal approach, this design removes any distraction, and offers clean, white space for your episodes and Calls to Action to shine!
Note: the Standard and Central themes will display your latest 5 episodes, while the Sidebar theme will display 10.
Website colors
Here you can choose the color scheme for your podcast website, so it ties in to any other branding you have for your show, as well as online/social media. Simply click on each option to use a preset color, or input your own hex code.
Body: the main colour for your website background. We'll take this colour and automagically use this for some complementary colours on your site. :)
Header: the colour of your website's header.
Footer: the colour of your website's footer
Highlight font: the colour of your website's highlights and links.
Header font: the colour of the text in your header.
Footer font: the colour of the text in your footer area.
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.
Note: Listen Highlight, Listen Background, About Highlight, and About Background options are only available on the default Site Theme 1.
Episode display order
Here you can choose which order your episodes are displayed to your listeners on your website - either oldest first, or newest. Most podcasters use newest episodes first.
And that's it - you've completed the Basic Settings of your Captivate Website, and you're well on the way to having a beautiful site to show off your show. Woot! π
Next up, it's time to set up your Header section.
Next: