Gloucestershire Music

Website creation/development

View more music case studies by clicking the links on the right, or visit the features section, with links to my articles for Sound Sense, the UK development agency for community music.

Gloucestershire Music (GM), the county council’s music education service, provides music lessons and other services to schools across the county, and runs 22 music groups for young people.

Its website was very dated and corporate-looking, and so the head of the service approached Writing Services to oversee the development of a new site - as the first phase of some longer term communications work.  This involved:

  • gaining the views of staff and customers through telephone interviews and e-surveys

  • developing a detailed brief in conjunction with web developers, ICON.net, and senior staff in the service

  • repurposing/editing existing content  and creating new content to make it appropriate for web-reading and to help develop GM’s brand

  • project management and acting as the liaison between GM and the web developers


The results:

Phase 1 of the new Gloucestershire Music website is now live, and includes:

  • a content management system to allow staff who run the 22 music groups to control their own ‘microsites’ and update pupil registers;

  • live music listings section in which anyone in the county can promote their event;

  • interactive elements including ‘find an instrument’ and ‘find a group’ tools; online payments and renewals; links to GM material on Flickr and YouTube;

  • RSS feeds so customers can keep up to date with news and events

  • a staff intranet complete with Google Calendar and other useful tools.

GM have yet to assess the impact in terms of traffic to the site and other indicators.


Future plans include greater interactivity for users (eg to encourage comments, feedback and conversation), more tools to help staff to manage their GM business online; a mailing list sign-up form and related database.


working with ...

Site developed by Small Business Websites