Services employed
Web
Psappha | Website
Founded in 1991, Psappha is the North West’s only stand-alone professional contemporary classical music ensemble. The organisation has performed at numerous venues around the world and collaborated with partners including the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, the Royal Northern College of Music and Princeton University, among many others.
Psappha champions contemporary composers and helps new generations of musicians discover and perform contemporary classical work.
The brief
Psappha sought out Carbon Creative to design a new website that would better reflect their ethos as a charity and engage a new generation of musicians and audiences.
The site needed to be much more than a static information page — it had to function as an active stage where Psappha could engage with its audience, showcase work, and enable people to support the charity.
Key objectives
- presenting contemporary classical music in an engaging and accessible way
- encouraging donations and making the donation process simple
- improving access to online and in-person event ticket booking
- supporting streaming and premiere content
- providing a reference hub for people wanting to watch, listen and learn about composers
The site also needed to be built in WordPress so that Psappha’s team could easily edit and manage content themselves in future.
Our creative approach
When designing Psappha’s website, visual appeal was important — but we also wanted users to get a genuine feel for what Psappha offers. We began with moodboards based on Psappha’s musical genre, contemporary classical. To reflect the blend of tradition and innovation, we suggested mixing serif and sans serif typography to represent “old and new” working together.
Psappha already had a strong library of high-quality performance photography, so this became central to the design, supported by flexible layouts that allow the team to update images and highlight new events and schemes as they happen.
We also focused strongly on the donation journey. Donations are vital to Psappha’s work, so we made the donation process simple and prominent in navigation, including one-off donation, regular giving options and clear information on the benefits of patronage.
The site was also designed to function as an online booking system for live performances and online premieres. As Psappha hosts both in-person shows and digital launches, we created a solution that supports ticket sales alongside YouTube premiere content.
Implementation and delivery
The final website delivered on all objectives identified at the brief stage. The Psappha team now regularly updates pages with new images and content, and embeds video and audio directly from platforms such as YouTube and SoundCloud.
This has significantly increased engagement, as users can watch and listen to performances directly on the website without needing to leave — helping keep audiences connected with Psappha’s work.
Results and impact
One of the most important outcomes of the project was improving how users select and purchase event tickets. We believed this had been achieved — and analytics confirmed it.
The live events page now consistently ranks in the top five most-visited pages on the website, compared with the previous site where events struggled to reach the top ten.
Everyone at Carbon Creative who worked on the Psappha project was delighted with the results. The collaborative process helped us understand Psappha’s vision in depth, and the new site is now a living platform for contemporary classical music, a space to inspire young musicians and a tool to promote events, learning and participation.
It supports Psappha’s mission not only to perform contemporary classical music but to share it, grow audiences and help people discover what the organisation can offer.
