Clare Marie Music

Not every client who comes to me knows how they want their website to look, however from the beginning, Clare Marie had a vision of her website and it was my job to translate this vision into a website that reflects her and the services she offers.

Who is Clare Marie?

Clare Marie is a saxophonist, pianist and DJ based in Devon. She provides live music for weddings, corporate events and private parties across the South West of England and her unique selling point is that, at the moment, she is the UK’s only female musician that can offer piano, saxophone and a DJ experience all in one package. Her primary market is weddings and she can offer different styles of music throughout the whole wedding from start to finish which is a huge benefit for wedding couples who only have to deal with one musician. Clare was in need of a website that would both inspire and excite her potential clients.

Starting with Clare’s vision

When Clare first made contact, she had a vision about how she wanted the website to look and very helpfully she sent me links to websites that had a similar style. This helped me to understand the look she had in mind and whilst I didn’t want it to copy these sites, I could see that she wanted a dark, dramatic and party vibe to the site. She also supplied with me a large quantity of high quality photos and videos of her in action at different events, which shaped the design process.

Handing the video, photography and reviews

Clare provided a lot of different photographs to use throughout the site and I tried to use a good number of them without being too overwhelming. However good photography, whilst crucial for any website design, can only go so far towards selling something like a wedding musician’s services. If you are going to book live music for your wedding, you want to know that you and your guests are going to enjoy it, so having videos that people can listen to as well as watch are going to be the best media resource for any wedding musician’s website.

The hero section is the large, attention-grabbing area at the top of a home page where you might have a striking image, a strong headline and a link/button or two to immediately dive into the website. It’s the first thing someone sees when they visit a website and needs to make the user keep reading on. My first version of the home page had a large photo of Clare holding her saxophone against a glittery background and a headline and text beside it. It looked good and Clare liked it but in the back of my mind I wondered if it was going to draw users in. I revisited the home page design after working on some of the internal pages and tried using one of Clare’s professionally made videos as a background to the headline instead. The video’s sound is optional and can be turned on and off by the user using buttons in the corner of the section, as it’s not good etiquette to have music immediately playing as soon as you load up a website in your browser. However the visual aspect of the video showing Clare playing whilst people dance shows the party vibe Clare brings that a still photograph can’t.

Clare also has over 100 five-star reviews at various review sites which are a major selling tool and it was important to feature a selection of these in prominent places throughout the website.

Structuring the site for different audiences

People planning their wedding are busy people. They have a lot to think about, lots of decisions to make and need to be able to find information quickly. The navigation and page structure of this site reflects that.

As Clare caters for other events as well as weddings, there are two different page on the website for the different audiences. There are also dedicated pages about her piano playing, saxophone playing and DJ services which have two purposes. They are aimed at users who might just want one of those services, but they also act as landing pages for SEO purposes.

Visitors to the site will often have questions that they might not immediately find the answer to, so there is also a dedicated FAQ page which should answer most of these questions and help visitors to decide whether to get in touch with Clare.

There are also plenty of opportunities to make contact with Clare throughout the site with contact forms on the home page, on a contact page and I also included special icons which sit on the right hand side of every page with links to Clare’s social media and email address. This was a fun little feature that I was pleased to be able to incorporate.

The finished site

Clare now has a website that looks and feels like her performances – fun, glitzy and a site which reflects her personality. The videos reflect the party atmosphere she can deliver to weddings and parties and the volume of five-star reviews, what’s called the social proof, is presented in a way that builds confidence in Clare’s services. She has a new marketing tool which I hope will only increase her bookings. I also enjoyed the challenge of creating a design that was a little different to my normal style.