About Cathedral Music Trust
Founded in 1956, Cathedral Music Trust is a charity based in the UK. They provide programmes and support to thousands of children, young people and adult musicians across the UK and Ireland to help increase the long-term sustainability of the cathedral music sector.
Working with other organisations and charities allows Cathedral Music Trust to provide ongoing support and develop expertise in a range of different areas. The impact that Cathedral Music Trust has on tens of thousands of people enables music departments to enhance what they already achieve as well as develop new work.
The brief
Cathedral Music Trust came to us for a new website that would meets the needs of their organisation and help communicate with their key audiences. The team wanted the website to come across friendly, personable and welcoming – it needed to focus on the people at the heart of the Trust who make them what they are, rather than feeling grand and exclusive.
They needed a website that would be able to showcase all of the great work that they do day-to-day – hosting events, providing resources, sharing news, encouraging donations, and maintaining an online shop.
Research-led design
The team at Cathedral Music Trust wanted to open up conversations with people about cathedral music, something that could seen as unapproachable. We worked with them to understand and research their audiences in detail before we began the design process of their new website to make sure we got a feel for the message they wanted to convey, and how they wanted to say it.
Our design team worked subtle illustrations throughout the site, depicting cathedral-related articles to add variety and intrigue to the design. These illustrations were woven within the modules to give the team at Cathedral Music Trust the ability to diversify pages and create points of interest within a page. Cathedral architecture is stunning, of course – but our goal was to keep these elements subtle to maintain focus on photography and people.
The design of this website is very visually focused, with large billboard images and image-led signpost blocks to guide users around the site, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the cathedral setting.
Page Views in Five Months
Accessibility Score
Custom WordPress development
Creating a website that will be futureproof and stand the test of time is one of the biggest priorities for our clients. Our web builds ensure that they are able to easily update their website with new features and designs without having to rebuild everything.
We continue to support the Cathedral Music Trust team with changes and updates to their website. The fully flexible, modular WordPress site offers them the tools they need to share their exciting new programmes for years to come, with a big “Discover” content hub filed with lots of in-depth education pages and multimedia content.
Bespoke events and integrations
Our web development team built a custom events section using Beacon CRM as the ticketing gateway. The team have a lot of options to highlight different content within event pages – for example, their annual Conference can be built up with lots of surrounding information, changing every year as they need,
We also integrated Cathedral Music Trust’s online shop, powered by Shopify, into the site to keep browsing, adding to cart and checking out as seamless as possible for every user.
Anna Kent
Cathedral Music Trust