Polls close tonight, and by tomorrow morning much of what your station built for the election starts to expire. The banners, voting reminders and polling place details that helped people yesterday can confuse a listener who finds them next week through a search, an old social post or your own homepage. A short cleanup tomorrow keeps your website trustworthy, and it sets you up for the next election instead of starting from scratch.
Start with the homepage, because that’s where stale information is most obvious. Take down the “Vote Tuesday” banners, early voting countdowns, pop-ups and slider images. Check your alert bar or breaking news ticker, too. A “polls are open” message still running Wednesday afternoon tells visitors nobody is minding the site. If you added an Elections link to your main menu, move it out of the top navigation until the next cycle so your regular content gets that space back.
Next, update your election information page rather than deleting it. Before the election, that page helped people register, find their polling place and look up a sample ballot. Now those instructions should come off or be clearly marked as past, and the top of the page should point to results. Link to your county or state’s official results, and if a race is close, say that the numbers are unofficial until they’re certified. Add a “last updated” date so visitors can tell the page is current. Keep the same web address, too. When the next election comes around, you can refresh that page instead of building a new one, and the links and search visibility it has earned will carry forward.
Your candidate interviews, forums and issue stories are worth keeping. People will keep looking up the winners, especially new officeholders their community doesn’t know well yet. Add a short note at the top of each piece with the outcome, something like “She won the race for county commissioner on November 3,” and link it to your results story. That turns a piece with a shelf life into a useful reference, the same idea we talked about in Stop Giving Your Best Local Content an Expiration Date.
Then check the ad placements on your website. Campaigns that bought airtime often bought digital, too, and those flights should end with the election. Make sure campaign creative isn’t still rotating in your banner spots, and that any sponsored election content is archived or clearly dated. An ad asking for someone’s vote the week after the election looks careless to your listeners and to the local businesses whose ads sit right next to it.
Finally, look beyond the website itself. Unpin election posts on your social accounts, clear past debates and forums out of your events calendar, and take election reminders out of any newsletter templates or automated emails. If your area has a runoff or a recount, keep those pages current until it’s settled, and then do the same cleanup again.
None of this takes long, and every election cycle is a chance to build a website your listeners trust a little more. That journey starts with an amazing website that keeps visitors coming back often. Reach out to us to start your path to online success, or schedule an appointment to see our tools in action.
We want to help your radio station grow and succeed online. That journey starts with an amazing website that keeps visitors coming back often. Reach out to us to start your path to online success, or schedule an appointment to see our tools in action.
