What we keep finding when classical music organisations rethink their websites

Most orchestra websites try to say everything at once. Concerts, recordings, education projects and news pile up season after season, and someone who just wants a ticket for Saturday has to dig for it.

We see this in the discovery workshops we run with orchestras, ensembles and classical music festivals. By the time they come to us, the navigation often runs to eight or nine items, the same event is listed in three places with slightly different details, and whoever updates the site has stopped trusting any of them.

It happens because classical organisations do so much. Concerts sit alongside recordings and streams, education work, youth and community ensembles, tours and festivals, and the website tries to give each equal billing. Visitors are left to work out what matters.

Untangling that is the first job of any redesign, and it’s why we start with discovery: a workshop with your team and a structural report, before anyone opens a design file. These are the patterns we see most often, and what we usually recommend.

1. Organise around what visitors want to do

Classical audiences are hard to pin to one persona. Subscribers may skew older, a community orchestra brings in a younger crowd of friends and family, and livestreams and recordings reach listeners around the world. A site designed around any one of them tends to frustrate the rest.

A better starting point is the task in front of each visitor. Most come to see or hear something, and the journeys from there look much the same from one organisation to the next:

A table like this helps form the backbone of the sitemap. Each item in the main navigation should serve one of these journeys, and content that serves none of them still has a home, just further from the front door.

Music lovers often arrive looking for something specific: a composer, a particular work or a performer they follow. A site that lets them search and browse by those gets them to the right concert or recording in a couple of clicks, where a date-ordered listing makes them scroll. Many more visitors are weighing up whether a concert is worth their evening and their money. First-time audiences especially judge quality from the site: clips of the orchestra playing, reviews, the calibre of the soloists and conductor. Sponsors and touring venues make the same judgement, so that evidence needs to be easy to find from anywhere on the site.

2. Let music lovers go deep without getting lost

Traditional classical audiences tend to want all the detail: every movement, every soloist, the programme note, the history of a work. The job is to layer it, so a newcomer can skim, and an enthusiast can keep going. In practice that means:

• Layered pages. Lead with the essentials (what, when, who) and put the full credits, programme notes and movement listings further down the page or a click away. Nothing is cut, and nobody has to read it all to buy a ticket.
• Full credits that link. A complete list of performers belongs on a concert or recording page, as long as each name links to that artist’s profile and their other appearances. Music@Menlo’s live recording pages show this well.
• Ways to explore. Let people browse by composer, work, performer, season or venue, and connect the pages: a piece links to its composer, the composer to their other works, and each work to past and upcoming performances.

Past seasons deserve the same care. An archive of previous concerts and recordings, linked from the footer, related pages and search, keeps years of work findable and holds on to its SEO value. It needs filtering (by season, composer or type) and pagination. Most we see are one long scroll, which makes that history hard to browse.

For organisations that want to show their full range, a lightweight Press & News feed works well: awards, coverage and quick announcements in one place, updated often, without crowding the main sections.

3. Close the gap between the website and the concert hall

Ask an ensemble what first-time audiences say on the way out, and you’ll often hear a version of “I had no idea you were that good.” Lovely to hear, though it also means the website undersold the concert to everyone who stayed at home.

A typical event page built from a standard widget offers a title, a date badge, a performer credit, the programme and a ticket box. Every detail is correct, and none of it makes anyone want to go. A story-led template does far more:

1. A full-width hero image or short looping video made for that concert
2. A one-sentence strapline that tells a story rather than stating a fact
3. One clear “Dates & Tickets” button in the hero
4. Two to four short paragraphs on why this performance, why now
5. A dates block that handles one concert or a full tour, each row linking to its own box office
6. Every selection listed in full: composer, title and movements (and, for the enthusiasts, key and tempo markings), with premieres and commissions marked
7. The conductor and performers with their instruments, each linked to a profile, plus a rehearsal clip or artist snippet
8. Practical info: running time, interval, pre-concert talk, a link to the digital programme, and venue access details (step-free routes, wheelchair spaces, hearing loops, relaxed performances, companion tickets)
9. Related concerts and the series or season it belongs to, so the page never dead-ends

Every concert uses the same template, which frees the team to spend their time on curating inspiring performances. 

Two smaller additions make a big difference. An award or press tag (“Award-winning”) used the same way across concerts, recordings and media means visitors spot recognition while they skim. Investing in quality visual assets is a smart way to help engage audiences by allowing them to connect emotionally with the performances.

4. Make every page lead to an action

Concerts, recordings, scores and outreach usually feed each other, yet on most sites they sit in separate sections with no paths between them. Part of discovery is mapping those paths:

• Concert to score or recording. “Loved this? Get the music” on a performance page, linking to the score, album or stream.
• Media to music. “Enjoyed this? Own the music” on a media page, worded as an invitation.
• Get Involved. Learning and participation pages (youth orchestras, choirs, school work) that finish with an application or enquiry form. When an organisation tells us most participants find them by word of mouth, the website journey usually stops too early.
• Story to support. A line such as “help support future projects like this” on a premiere, commission or education project page, placed where the reader has just seen what their money pays for.

The Support page works best when it opens with what donations have made possible and keeps the ask short after that. If you run a Friends scheme or membership, give it its own page: people treat a gift and a purchase very differently, and mixing them confuses both. Specific asks, such as sponsoring a player’s chair or a new commission, give donors something concrete to back.

These links also help search engines see how your content fits together, which counts in your favour.

5. Build it for the people who’ll update it

Most arts organisations run their website with a small team, often one person who also handles social media. How the site is updated matters as much as how it looks, and two requirements come up in nearly every project.

A single source of truth. Each concert, artist, composer and work should exist once in the back end, and every page that mentions them pulls from that record. When Brahms’s Fourth Symphony appears in three concerts and a recording, its details are entered once, and the Brahms page lists all four. Edit it once, and it updates everywhere.

Brand-locked templates with flexible fields. Rigid templates break as soon as content they weren’t designed for is forced in, and complete freedom leads to inconsistent, slow, one-off pages. Consider a small set of templates per content type (concert, series, artist, work and media) with styling locked to the brand and content fields loose enough for unusual projects.

Smaller details worth getting right early:

• Multi-date events. One performance record should hold many dates, so a single template serves a one-off concert, a repeat performance or a ten-city tour.
• Automatic archiving. Past events should drop out of listings on their own – keyed off the last date in a run, so a tour doesn’t vanish halfway through.
• Ticketing: link out or integrate. Linking out to the venue’s box office or a system such as Spektrix, Tessitura or Ticketsolve is the simplest and cheapest route. Integrating ticketing into your own site can give visitors a smoother journey, but it adds cost and complexity, so it’s a budget decision to weigh up early.
• Manual status. “On sale / sold out / cancelled” is a field your team sets, because third-party box offices rarely feed availability back reliably.
• Routed forms. Each form goes to the right person and is saved on the site as well as emailed, so no enquiry gets lost.
• Performance category tags. Tags such as orchestral, chamber, choral, contemporary or family, used the same way everywhere, let visitors filter listings and see at a glance what kind of event it is.
• Accessibility built in. Captions and transcripts for video and audio, alt text on images, readable colour contrast, and listings that work with a screen reader and keyboard. Aim for WCAG 2.2 AA from the start, as retrofitting it later is slower and costs more.

Most arts organisations run their website with a small team, often one person who also handles social media. How the site is updated matters as much as how it looks, and two requirements come up in nearly every project. Get them wrong, and the site slowly becomes harder to look after, which is why classical music websites become difficult to manage over time.

6. Choose the right platform

The platform decides what your team can do day to day, from updating listings to selling tickets, so it’s worth settling early. These are the realistic options for most classical organisations:

For most ensembles that outsource ticketing and have no in-house developer, the first two routes are the more proportionate choice. One tip if you go with Webflow or Framer: embed video via YouTube, Vimeo or the streaming platform’s player rather than uploading files. That keeps you well inside monthly bandwidth limits.

7. Play to your distinctiveness in search

You’re unlikely to win “classical music London” or “orchestra London”. You can rank for the specific: a named work (“Mahler 5 London”), a soloist, a composer anniversary or a premiere. Distinctive programming is an SEO advantage, as long as the site gives each concert, work and artist its own clearly labelled page. Add schema.org MusicEvent markup to performance pages and your dates, venues and ticket links can appear directly in Google results.

Tone matters for the same reason. If your programming challenges the canon, generic prestige imagery and copy will undercut it.

What a discovery gives you

Our discovery phase is a half-day, in-person workshop with your core team, followed within one to two weeks by a written report. You come away with:

• A proposed sitemap built around your visitors’ real journeys
• A page-by-page content structure, with the purpose and priority of every page
• Template options for your key content types
• A platform recommendation sized to your budget and team
• A short list of open questions for you to decide, so nothing gets quietly assumed

We keep it separate from design and build, so you can use the report to scope the next phase accurately, whether you carry on with us or take it elsewhere.

If your website has grown faster than its structure, we’d love to talk. Get in touch with Chaptr.