The Raleigh Music Collective

Client Profile

The Raleigh Music Collective (Demo Preview)

Project Summary

The Raleigh Music Collective is an El Sistema inspired nonprofit that gives children from refugee, immigrant, and low-income families a tuition-free path into music, from first-year string classes at a community hub up to full núcleo orchestras and one-on-one lessons. We rebuilt their site to look the way the work feels, bright and warm and hopeful, with the waitlist and a clear way to give one tap from the homepage and their own hero video kept front and center.

Objectives

• Carry the program’s “Creativity, Dignity, and Joy” spirit into a bright, photo-rich site instead of a tidy but plain template
• Put the waitlist, lessons signup, and a clear way to give one tap from the homepage
• Make the three program paths (núcleo orchestras, community-hub classes, lessons studio) and the summer camp easy to follow
• Fix accessibility so a tuition-free, serve-all-people program lives up to that promise online
• Give the small team a site they can keep current themselves through the Fugue Lab CMS

What We Implemented

• Bright sunlit-ivory surface with deep teal ink and a marigold and coral polychrome accent, the opposite of the dark-stage register used for other education demos
• Bricolage Grotesque paired with Hanken Grotesk, a light editorial split hero, and a “collective” dot-cluster signature of many students gathering into one ensemble
• The org’s real Squarespace hero video scraped and re-encoded to web-weight, served device-responsively (desktop and mobile sources) and poster-backed
• Vite + React 18 + Tailwind CSS 4 wired to @gjl/site-kit as a bespoke-but-CMS-editable site
• CMS content seam via useSite() with each block independently falling back to compiled-in static content
• SSR/hydration with per-route static prerendering (SSG) plus generated sitemap, robots, and structured data
• Twelve routes plus standard privacy and accessibility pages

Results

• A 61-to-97 (A) rendered quality score, up from a failing grade on the current site
• Accessibility lifted from 0 to 100, the one place the old site fell short of its serve-all-people promise
• Their own hero video preserved and shown front and center on a fast, phone-friendly home
• A CMS-editable platform the team can update without touching design or code