Tagiev Music School was founded in 2001 by the violinist and educator Emin Tagiev, and it works from Chapel Hill in Brisbane’s west. The teaching is built around strings: individual violin lessons, music theory, early musical development groups for young children, and the Tagiev Youth Chamber Orchestra.
The school’s published record is unusual for a studio of its size. Its graduates have continued at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Juilliard School in New York, the Academy of Music in Toronto and the Australian Academy of Music in Melbourne. The chamber orchestra took a gold medal at the 18th Australian International Music Festival in Sydney in 2007 and was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, and its members have played in Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China and the United States. Since 2012 the school has also run the Brisbane International Youth Music Competition, a non-profit event where every entrant gets written feedback from the judging panel and the finalists perform at a gala concert. Those are the school’s own statements, carried across from the previous site, and they describe the school rather than this project.
That record matters for one practical reason. It gives three different readers a reason to arrive, and they want different things. A parent is choosing a first violin teacher for a six-year-old. An advanced student, or their teacher, is weighing an orchestra seat or a competition entry against a school year that is already full. A supporter is looking for the donation the competition runs on. One page cannot open a conversation with all three.
The previous site was not neglected. Someone had been posting to it for years. The problem was that it was still shaped like the blog it started as.
It ran on Twenty Twenty, the WordPress default theme from 2020, on WordPress 5.9.8. The front page was a reverse-chronological feed of posts, so whatever had been published most recently became the school’s introduction to the world. On the snapshot we captured before the rebuild, that was a pinned notice calling for viola and cello players, with minimum AMEB grades, a maximum age, Sunday rehearsal times and a repertoire requirement. It is a perfectly good notice. It is a strange first sentence for a parent who has just searched for violin lessons in Brisbane.
Everything else was one level further down than it should have been. The menu ran three levels deep across roughly twenty items, and the programmes sat at the bottom of it, at addresses like /junior-ensemble/programs/early-musical-development-groups/. Choosing between early development groups, theory and the orchestra meant opening a submenu inside a submenu, which is a task on a desktop and a lottery on a phone.
The site had also collected the usual sediment of a long-lived WordPress install. Two donation plugins were active at once, Give and Seamless Donations, each with its own forms and its own styling. Contact Form 7 was five versions behind. The front page carried two images, for a school whose whole subject is performance.
One honest limitation to record. There was no SEO plugin and no analytics of any kind on the old site, not Google Analytics, not Tag Manager, nothing. That means there is no traffic, ranking or enquiry baseline to compare the rebuild against, and this case study does not pretend otherwise. Measurement would have to start from scratch.
Fourteen days, four stages, each one feeding the next.
We went through every page of the existing site, the full menu tree, the plugin list and the media library. That pass produced the finding the rebuild turned on: the school’s strongest material, its history and its achievements, existed on the site already and was three clicks from the front page, while the front page itself was an audition notice.
We cut the tree to nine pages and decided what each one was for before writing a word: a front page that introduces the school, one page per programme, one page for the competition, and About, Gallery, Blog and Contact behind them. Twenty-odd menu items became ten, with a single submenu grouping the classes. We also decided where the enquiry form and the contact details belonged, which turned out to be everywhere.
We set the visual direction and built the site on Hello and Elementor Pro as a small set of reusable sections: hero, programme cards, story block, testimonial band, gallery strip, contact block with the enquiry form, footer. The programme pages are the same components in a different order, which is what made nine pages possible in two weeks.
We wrote the page copy, moved the material worth keeping off the old site, prepared the photography, kept the events calendar and the donation form working through the change, then checked forms and layouts across desktop, tablet and phone before launch.
Most of a rebuild is deciding what not to touch, and that decision is easier to get wrong than the design.
We kept the events calendar on The Events Calendar, the plugin the school already had. It was being used correctly, the staff knew it, and moving events to something new would have bought nothing except a training session. We kept Give, for the same reason and because the competition’s donation history lives in it. We kept the school’s own account of itself, including sentences from the founder, rather than rewriting the story of a school we had known for two weeks in a voice it had not asked for. And we kept the photographs, some of which go back to performances from 2015, because a new gallery of nothing is worse than an old gallery of something.
What we did not keep was the shape. The plugins, the archive and the story were all fine. The container they sat in was the problem, and that is the usual answer when a site has been running for a decade.
The site is a WordPress build on the Hello theme with Elementor Pro, assembled from reusable sections rather than from nine separate designs. That is what made two weeks realistic, and it is what keeps the programme pages consistent with each other.
The choice of WordPress was not really a choice. The school was already on WordPress, with several years of posts, an events calendar in use and a donation plugin holding real records. Moving platforms would have meant migrating all of that, retraining the person who posts the notices, and spending the fortnight on plumbing instead of on the site. Rebuilding inside WordPress meant the school kept its content, its tools and its habits, and changed the thing that was actually broken.
Two options were considered and dropped. A theme swap alone was rejected because a new theme over a blog-shaped site produces a better-looking blog, not a school website, and the menu would have stayed three levels deep. A custom-coded build was rejected because a school of this size needs to add a concert notice without ringing a developer.
| Element | How it is handled |
| Programmes | Four dedicated pages: early musical development groups, theory lessons, the youth chamber orchestra, and the international competition |
| Navigation | Ten menu items with a single Our Classes submenu, in place of three levels and roughly twenty items |
| Enquiry paths | A short enquiry form at the foot of every page, plus phone, email and the Chapel Hill address in the same block, and a dedicated contact page |
| Proof | The school’s achievements and the conservatoires its graduates went on to, on the About page one click from the front page, with named testimonials from parents and students on the home page |
| Events | The Events Calendar kept from the previous site, still publishing concerts and rehearsals |
| Donations | One donation plugin, Give, replacing the two that were running side by side |
| Media | A gallery of performance photography, including images from the school’s own archive |
Tagiev Music School already had the twenty-year record, the orchestra, the competition and the students. What it did not have was a website organised the way a visitor thinks.
A parent looking for a first violin teacher now reads about the early development groups on a page about the early development groups. A seventeen-year-old cellist weighing an orchestra seat reads about the orchestra. A supporter meets one donation form instead of two. And the achievements that made the school worth choosing sit one click from the front page instead of three.
Two things are worth saying plainly. There are no before-and-after numbers in this case study, because the old site had no analytics and no search console data to compare against, and inventing a figure would be worse than admitting the gap. And the school’s own claims, from Carnegie Hall to the gold medal, remain the school’s claims: our part was to put them where a visitor could find them.
If your organisation has years of work behind it and a website that still opens with whatever was posted last, the fix is structural rather than decorative. Talk to us about a redesign, or see the live Tagiev Music School site and judge the work for yourself.
