Christopher Bond
A composer and conductor who sells his own scores. His site was on a page builder that could list products but couldn't deliver them, and every change meant working around the tool rather than with it.
The hand-built site
The store — every work as a record, browsableSixty-odd works, each with cover artwork, sat in a store that treated a musical score like a t-shirt. A customer paid, then waited for a file to be sent by hand. Nothing about the catalogue — instrumentation, duration, grade, who commissioned it — was structured, so nothing could be filtered or found. The site was also his only public face as a conductor and teacher, and the store had crowded that out.
What success looked like- A customer buys a score and has it within a minute, without anyone doing anything.
- Every work is described properly — section, duration, difficulty, commissioned by, broadcasts — and can be browsed by those things.
- The conducting and teaching side gets equal billing again.
- Chris can change prices, add a work or update a biography without asking us.
Why hand-build rather than pick a better shop platform. A hosted checkout would have solved the payment and left the real problem: delivering a PDF that the buyer can use but can't simply pass around. Watermarked delivery — the buyer's name and order stamped on every page, generated at the moment of purchase — is the thing a composer actually needs, and no off-the-shelf store does it well. Once that had to be built, the rest of the site was better built to match than bolted on.
Why structured data first. We spent the first days on the catalogue, not the design: every work as a record with named fields, validated, so the store, the search and the admin screen all read from one source. It is the least glamorous part of the job and the reason everything after it went quickly.
Why a bespoke admin screen. Chris is one person with a store and a diary. A general-purpose content system would give him two hundred options and the wrong twelve. His admin screen does exactly what his site needs — the catalogue, the quotes, the broadcasters, the site settings — with a preview before anything goes live and a way to put the last version back.
The solution- A hand-coded site, dark and photograph-led, with the catalogue presented as a wall of cover artwork.
- A store with card payments, and scores delivered as watermarked PDFs automatically on payment.
- A catalogue of structured records — instrumentation, duration, difficulty, commissions, broadcasts — feeding the store and its filtering.
- An admin screen built for him: edit, preview, publish, restore.
- Static hosting, so the site costs almost nothing to run and loads in well under a second.
Measured after launch — orders fulfilled without anyone touching them, time to first download, and what changed in the enquiries the site produces. This page is updated when the numbers exist rather than before.
Christopher Bond is a working composer and conductor, and this site is published with his permission. His own site is the place to see the work itself.