Black Squirrel Entertainment

Black Squirrel Entertainment is Kent State’s streaming platform for TV and radio. In my last year of college I built them a web app to distribute their content.
BlackSquirrelRadio.com

Background

When I started college I joined a small sketch comedy show as a fun way to spend my time between classes. As a side effect I got very involved with the student broadcasting station as a whole. At the start of my senior year, the TV Entertainment department was restructured and merged with the student radio station to form a new organization: Black Squirrel Entertainment. With this, I applied to be the website manager for the new organization, and was tasked with redesigning their website.

Key Problems

  1. The site needed to handle both the college’s TV and Radio livestreams.
  2. The livestreams are handled through a third-party service, which made it difficult to fully integrate them with the site.
  3. The TV department had a 24/7 programming schedule that had never been seen by the public.
  4. The old site had been made with WordPress, which is very inconvenient for coding everything yourself, but for the sake of allowing other members of the organization to maintain their current workflows for publishing content, I did not want to completely remove that.
  5. I would probably be the last Web Manager for a long time who understands PHP and MySQL, which means that I needed an easy way for future managers to update the site and understand how it works.

The Process

What I started with

The organization’s two halves had previously been hosted on two separate sites. Radio was made using Wordpress, which is a great tool for creating blogs or personal webpages, but is not ideal for streaming. This resulted in a site that was so full of articles that it became difficult to even find the livestream amid all the clutter. Radio Site Archive

TV, on the other hand, did not have its own site. The TV Entertainment department was considered a suborganization of the TV News department, which was itself a suborganization of the student newspaper. So if I wanted to watch a show as it aired, I would have to go to the student newspaper’s website, search for a link to the TV livestream, scroll past all the articles and video clips, before finally finding what I’m looking for. TV Site Archive

Needless to say, there was room for improvement in many aspects.

Wireframing