A large, inconsistent set of hand-edited HTML, migrated to a system anyone could edit
A Grammy-winning early music ensemble had built a deep archive of concerts, performers, and programme notes — every page written by hand. Any change meant finding someone who could edit HTML.
- Client
- Blue Heron
- pages moved into a CMS staff could edit
- 100+
- Longevity
- Still in daily use by the organization
The problem
Blue Heron had something genuinely valuable: years of concert history, performer biographies, and writing on performance practice, all published on the web. It was also all hand-written HTML. Adding a concert meant editing confusing, error-prone code. Correcting a performer’s biography meant editing markup. The archive’s depth had become the reason nobody wanted to touch it.
What I did
I moved the whole thing into a content management system without flattening what made it good.
- Migrated 100+ pages of concert history, performer profiles, and programme material, preserving the structure that made the archive navigable.
- Modeled the content properly — concerts, performers, and seasons as related things rather than as a pile of pages — so listings build themselves.
- Handed over editing to the staff and volunteers who know the repertoire, which is where that knowledge belonged all along.
- I continue to provide support as needed, usually with routine upgrades and occasional questions about content.
The result
The people who actually know the material can now publish it. The archive keeps growing instead of freezing, and the site is still in daily use at blueheron.org (opens in a new tab).
- WordPress
- Content migration
- Information architecture