Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus
Providing young instrumentalists the highest quality orchestral experience.
What we do for Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus
The Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus has trained young musicians in Columbus, Georgia since 1993. Their site had been on Wix, and the pages a parent actually needs, auditions, concerts and programs, were not easy to reach. We designed and built a new seven-page site and moved the domain, with their staff email routing through the whole cutover untouched.
The riskiest part of a launch is the part nobody sees
A new website is the visible half of a domain move. The invisible half is everything else that lives on that domain, and for the Youth Orchestra of Greater Columbus that meant their staff email.
Their mail runs on Google Workspace at yogc.org, the same domain as the website. A DNS
cutover is precisely the moment that breaks, and when it breaks a small nonprofit loses the
inbox it uses to reach parents, students and donors. So the cutover was planned around the
mail records first and the website second.
The result: the site went live, and the mail exchange, the DKIM key and the existing DMARC record all came through untouched. No downtime, no bounced messages, nothing to restore.
What went live
Seven pages, built from scratch, organised around what a parent is actually looking for: the five ensembles, when auditions are, and when the orchestra is performing. Program descriptions are preserved in the organisation’s own wording, because that copy was written by people who run the programs.
Every page carries its own social share card, and those cards were re-scraped after launch so that links stop showing the previous site. That last step is easy to skip and it is why a freshly launched site can spend weeks unfurling as the old one every time somebody shares it.
The detail we would repeat
The client did the DNS edit herself. She was understandably nervous about breaking something and offered to send us the login to her Google account so we could do it for her. That login opens her whole Workspace, email included, and it was far more access than the job needed.
We declined it and gave her two safer routes instead: invite us into the domain settings through the platform’s own collaborator system, or make just the two record changes that actually move the website and let us handle the rest afterward. She picked the first one and was done in three minutes.
Asking for the least access that does the job is not a formality. It is usually also the fastest way to get the job done.
Services
Web Design
A seven-page site built from scratch: home, about, programs, auditions, concerts and events, contributions and contact. Program copy preserved in the organisation's own wording rather than paraphrased.
Hosting
Managed hosting, the domain cutover from Wix, a security certificate issued the same afternoon, and a share card on every page.
What our AI platform found
A nonprofit whose audience is parents and students on a season calendar, so the site has to answer auditions, concerts and programs before it does anything else.
Their staff email runs on Google Workspace at the same domain as the website, which makes a domain move the single riskiest moment in the project.
Authentic photography only. The client flagged an earlier homepage image as looking AI generated because she did not recognise the students, so every photograph on the site is theirs.
Want results like this for your business?
Schedule a call with Lucas to talk about what we can do for you.