North Valley Chorale

Client Profile

North Valley Chorale (Demo Preview)

Project Summary

The North Valley Chorale is a 501(c)(3) community chorus of more than 60 singers, ages 18 to 85, in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. Founded in 2008 and led by Artistic Director Eleanor Johnson, the all-volunteer choir performs affordable concerts spanning classical, Broadway, patriotic, and sacred music, and brings choral music to memory-care residents, seniors, and veterans through its outreach program. This bespoke demo replaces their cluttered stock-WordPress site with a warm, type-led design while keeping every section editable in the Fugue Lab CMS.

Objectives

• Lead with their own line, "the choir that cares," and the outreach mission that gives the choir its name
• Replace a 25-plus-item menu with a focused seven-page structure built around the music and the 2026 season
• Make the free, all-ages concert season easy to find, read, and share
• Carry the choir without a photo library by leaning on type, color, and embedded performance video
• Hand the all-volunteer board a site they can edit themselves through the Fugue Lab CMS

What We Implemented

• Custom warm, type-led theme: garnet and gold on warm sand, chosen for an intergenerational community choir rather than a stock template
• Petrona display type paired with Figtree body, with the tagline set as a recurring warm-italic refrain
• Signature hand-drawn "songline" swash, a loose sung phrase that underlines the tagline and section heads
• Typography-led centered-statement hero plus embedded YouTube performances, since only one real photograph existed
• Vite + React 18 + Tailwind CSS 4 wired to @gjl/site-kit as a bespoke-but-CMS-editable site
• SSR/hydration with per-route static prerendering (SSG) plus generated sitemap, robots, and JSON-LD
• Seven routes: Home, About, Concerts, Outreach, Watch & Listen, Leadership, and Join

Results

• Seven fully prerendered routes scoring 97/100 (A) on the rendered quality audit, against the current site’s 63/100 (D)
• Accessibility lifted from 0 to 100, plus social-share tags and event structured data the old site lacked
• A distinctive, warm identity that foregrounds the choir’s music and outreach instead of a generic ensemble template
• A CMS-editable platform the volunteer board can update without touching design or code