How DeeperBlue built a Webby-winning podcast site with Podpage
DeeperBlue is the definitive weekly guide to what’s happening underwater. Every week, the show explores scuba, freediving, dive travel, and ocean news—and features interviews with world-famous pioneers and fearless modern explorers.
But for nearly a year, DeeperBlue struggled behind the scenes with the technical complexity of running their podcast website on WordPress.
“We run a lot of our site on WordPress so it felt natural to start our first podcast site there. We built a whole podcast-specific site with a podcast theme.”
Even with experience using WordPress for editorial content, the process of crafting and maintaining a show website was clunky and time-consuming.
“We’re very used to writing content in WordPress, so we thought it would come naturally—but like so many themes out there, it didn’t quite hit the spot.”
Design frustrations and a weekly time sink
DeeperBlue wanted a design that truly matched the look and feel of their brand. But WordPress made that difficult.
“The design looked ‘okay’ but we found it hard to match what we really wanted. Everything had to be crafted manually.”
Managing SEO metadata, social sharing previews, and page formatting became its own weekly project.
“All the usual technical things around SEO, metadata, and sharing take time—and need to be constantly tweaked to work correctly.”
“The whole editing and creating process was just overly complicated. Yes, it’s a visual editor, but it’s not designed for building simple, effective podcast pages.”
Each new episode required a long list of repetitive steps, turning website updates into a major drag on the team’s time.
Switching to Podpage: instant relief and a better listener experience
After 9 months of trying to make WordPress work, DeeperBlue found Podpage—and everything changed.
“We signed up to Podpage and immediately wished we had found it from the start.”
“From the moment we signed up it was incredibly easy to get setup and create a beautiful website that fit with our branding and showcased our episodes.”
Podpage’s automation tools instantly cut their weekly workload in half.
“Previously we had to manually handcrank each episode in WordPress. Now it all automatically imports from our Buzzsprout RSS feed, and we get notified by the Podpage bot that an episode has been imported.”
“This saves us at least an hour each week that we can now use for more valuable production and promotion work.”
Custom tools for listener engagement
With Podpage, DeeperBlue also introduced new interactive features—without building anything themselves.
“We love the voicemail feature. We have a listener-contributed segment called ‘Best Dive Ever,’ and we needed listeners to easily record on their device. We tried a few solutions, but having something built into Podpage was epic.”
Everything from episode grouping to sponsor integration now happens natively in the platform.
“We can tag episodes to group our seasons together, add sponsors to specific episodes or seasons, and create beautiful pages easily.”
Rockstar support and constant improvement
Podpage didn’t just solve their publishing headaches—it helped the show win a Webby.
“Podpage has provided actual rockstar support all the way through. We submitted a couple of requests early on and found that tweaks had already been applied to the website. We didn’t even need to figure stuff out ourselves.”
“The way features are added all the time is brilliant. There is constant innovation and listening to your customers, which is incredibly valuable.”
The final result
- Automated import of episodes from Buzzsprout, saving hours each week
- Season tagging and sponsor integration
- Beautiful additional pages and streamlined site navigation
- Built-in voicemail for listener contributions
- Google-ready SEO and fast load speeds
“With Podpage, we run less, publish faster, and engage our audience more directly—and that helped us build a site that won a Webby.”
About the podcast
DeeperBlue is the award-winning weekly guide to everything happening around the world… underwater. From scuba and freediving to dive travel and ocean conservation, each episode brings you closer to the people shaping the underwater world.
