A Great Host of Composers
A grant-funded catalogue of sacred choral and organ music by women composers, moved out of a 17-tab spreadsheet and onto 1,312 pages a search engine can read.
The Transformation
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The database
Homepage
Client Profile
A Great Host of Composers
Project Summary
Three years of curation, a grant from the Association of Anglican Musicians, and a team of nine had produced the best list of sacred music by women composers I have seen. It lived in a Google Sheet behind a link shortener, and no search engine could read a word of it. The rebuild put every work on its own page, indexed by the Sunday it serves, and left the founder able to maintain it herself.
Objectives
- Make 842 works findable by the day of the church year they serve
- Give every work, composer and poet its own indexable page
- Keep the lectionary distinctions the collection exists to preserve
- Hand editing to the founder, so the catalogue stays a living document
- Move the domain without interrupting the parish email it carries
What We Implemented
- Modelled the three-year Revised Common Lectionary alongside the music it does not govern: Evensong, Mass settings, weddings and the saints days on their own calendar
- Resolved 1,270 spreadsheet rows into 842 distinct works across roughly 1,150 work-and-day pairings
- Turned the bolding she had been using to mark poets into a Poets section of 60 pages
- Music-native fields on every work page: voicing, forces, accompaniment, language, duration, difficulty, publisher
- CMS editing for the founder, with old page addresses kept alive so nothing already emailed to contributors breaks
- Proved the DNS records equivalent before the nameserver cut, then tested the mail path after it
Results
- Live on the client domain, greathostcomposers.org, on August 5, 2026
- 1,312 pages in the sitemap, where the old site had six
- Every work searchable on its own terms rather than behind a spreadsheet link
- The primary call to action no longer passes through an affiliate ad interstitial
- The founder adds and corrects works herself, and the site republishes
- Converted to a paying build plus monthly retainer
Key Metrics
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Serving a church or parish?
We specialize in music ministry and liturgical websites.
Start a Conversation