Every individual musician or ensemble we work with has a uniquely different idea about how they want to be presented on the web. From specific creative visions to content and functionality: Most conventions simply do not apply. Templating or blue-printing is often a waste of time. You only ever build the same thing once.
When violist Molly Carr and pianist Anna Petrova – both already solo clients – approached us about getting our hands on their new Duo website, the brief was yet another exciting new mix of stylistic requirements, brand communication, storytelling elements and interactivity.
The brief
Show the full picture: Here’s a dynamic duo of two high-flying professional classical artists with extra dimensions that go beyond the music: charitable projects, grassroots activism, compositional commissions, education and an overall unconventional approach that needs to be reflected in all aspects of their output – on and off stage. The new website had to speak to concert audiences, promoters, charities, press and students alike as they were seeking to pick up a diverse spectrum of users.
- typical artist website must-haves: tour calendar with past engagement archive, eCommerce for tangible and downloadable audio and sheet music, biographies with downloadable press content, video and photo gallery, contact form
- A blog: written by Molly and Anna, but published and managed by their content team
- A 4-part travelogue, telling the story of the Duo’s recent 50-day international Refugee Aid Project incl. an interactive US directory of aid organisations.
- Data capture and the development of a holistic journey for engaged users.
- Visually, Molly and Anna were keen to depart from the glossy style of the typical classical musician’s website. They consciously asked us to work on a concept that would break that mould and add some edginess, boldness, and minimalism with a hint of urban grunge – all done within measures to also satisfy conventional promoters and educational institutions
- Simple digital branding: without going to town with a lavish branding exercise, we still needed a simple, versatile, multi-purpose digital logo for various use cases.
Objectives
- Communicate clearly the artists’ messaging and work hierarchy to media and promoters
- Establishing an SEO environment for their upcoming 2nd album release
- Increase the number of booking requests while reducing unnecessary comms admin
- Connect with audiences and students by growing a zero-party email database
- Set a visual style that will join up all future output.
The solution
The creative comfortably combines clarity with personality: simple and clean headlines and text, confident colours and a balanced amount of space. Occasional duo-tone fades, gentle grunge overlays and the odd gradient map add an urban, modern twist. Apart from a few exceptions, we stayed away from the dark, auditorium-style backgrounds, and pseudo-elegant gold serif lettering to avoid the dreaded cliché.
For the functional delivery, we set up a small stack of WordPress plugins that would fulfil the technical brief around Elementor PRO as a base page builder, courageously utilising the flexbox container method ahead of its stable release. Leap13 and Dynamic.ooo provided clever interactive widgets and remote content integration, allowing us to be extravagant and smart: We introduced mechanisms to maximise efficiency and – wherever possible – utilise cross-domain content to optimise backend admin. This means content like tour dates and biographies can be pulled in from existing, external websites (solo artists, agents, management) using filtered JSON data. A massive time saver for two busy musicians, educators and activists.
The result
The best result is a happy client – in this case, two of them. Molly Carr and Anna Petrova are truly thrilled to see their artistic temperament perfectly communicated.
Working with nadworks is a dream! They are the most professional, imaginative, knowledgeable digital marketing/website design agency we have encountered. We cannot recommend them enough. Nadja took our branding, mission, and sometimes-nebulous ideas and made them sparkle in a clean, fun, coherent, and impactful package. We will never work with anyone else from here on out!
— Carr-Petrova Duo
A musician’s website objectives are rarely SEO performance and sales alone – and frequently not even that at all. As it’s often the case, we were asked to translate artistic excellence, professionalism and a high career level into the digital space through clear communication and a distinctly unique web experience. Yet we won’t ignore the cold stats either: monthly average unique site visits are up by 47% since the launch, with a 3x longer session time. As we start focussing on email marketing and the release of the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Documentary, part two of this case study is only as far away as the next concert tour.
The essential tools:
Elementor PRO, Dynamic.ooo, Leap13’s Premium Addons, Perfmatters, WP Rocket
carrpetrovaduo.com has been designed and developed and is hosted and powered by nadworks.
