Cinematic bespoke WordPress build for singer and vocal coach Lauren Waterworth — oxblood and antique gold editorial art direction, a handwritten signature brand mark, custom content types for shows and media, and a hidden backstage dashboard the client runs the whole site from.
Lauren Waterworth is a singer and vocal coach working in Wigan and online — performing live and teaching, with an audience across Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and Facebook.
The difficulty with a performer's website is that it is never finished. Gigs get booked and cancelled, new photos and video land constantly, and the moment updating means emailing an agency the site starts going stale. Most artists end up either paying per change or letting the dates drift months out of date — and an out-of-date gig list is worse than none at all.
The brief: something that looks like a programme rather than a profile page — genuinely cinematic, unmistakably hers — and that she can keep current herself, without being handed a WordPress login and told to be careful. Plus a mailing list that belongs to her rather than to a platform she rents.
Every Mako Digital case study includes a complete build specification — the actual technical decisions that made the project what it is.
Every Mako Digital build follows a documented approach — consistent across every project, calibrated to each client’s industry, brand, and customer journey.
Most musician websites are a photo, a Spotify embed and a booking form on whatever theme was cheapest. This one is built as an editorial, cinematic experience — oxblood and antique gold on warm off-white, Fraunces set large against Inter Tight, and a curtains-up reveal on load. It reads like a programme rather than a profile page, which is the right register for someone who performs for a living.
Rather than set the name in a font and call it a logo, the navigation carries Lauren's handwritten signature as an inlined SVG that inherits its colour from whatever surface it sits on. It scales rather than resizes, so it stays crisp at any size, and it gives a personal-brand site the one thing a typeface cannot — something that is unmistakably hers.
Gigs change, media gets added, and none of that should mean a call to the agency. The build ships a hidden /backstage/ area with its own login, separate from the WordPress admin, where Lauren adds, edits and removes shows and media herself. Behind it sit purpose-built content types for shows, media, subscribers and reviews — a proper little CMS, presented as four simple screens.
Performance sites live on video and usually get wrecked by it. Embeds here are handled through custom oEmbed processing with Vimeo capability checks and poster-image fallbacks, so a video that cannot embed degrades to a still rather than an empty box, and the page is not held hostage by a third-party player while it loads.
Newsletter signups are captured and stored on the site itself rather than rented from a mailing platform, so the audience list belongs to Lauren. The same principle runs through the build: hand-coded theme, self-hosted WordPress, a bespoke sitemap replacing both Yoast's and WordPress's own, and no subscription that can be cancelled out from under her.
If we wouldn’t put it on our own business, we wouldn’t put it on yours.The Mako Digital Standard
Lauren Waterworth Case Study: Mako Digital designed and built a bespoke cinematic WordPress website for Lauren Waterworth, a singer and vocal coach based in Wigan. The build delivered a hand-coded theme with no page builder, editorial art direction in oxblood and antique gold, a handwritten signature brand mark inlined as SVG, custom content types for shows, media, subscribers and reviews, custom video embed handling, on-site newsletter capture, and a bespoke XML sitemap replacing both Yoast's and WordPress core's.
This is the build we point musicians, performers, coaches and personal brands at when they want a site they can keep current themselves. See our web design for music teachers page, web design in Wigan, or visit the case study archive for more examples.
A bespoke cinematic WordPress website for a singer and vocal coach — seven public pages plus a hidden client dashboard. The theme is hand-coded with no page builder, and includes custom content types for shows, media, subscribers and reviews, a handwritten signature brand mark inlined as SVG, custom video embed handling, on-site newsletter capture, and a bespoke XML sitemap.
Yes. Performer websites have a specific problem: the content changes constantly — new gigs, new photos, new video — and most artists end up either paying an agency for every update or letting the site go stale. The answer is a simple client dashboard, which is exactly what this build ships. See our web design for music teachers and dance schools pages.
Yes, and for a lot of clients it is the right answer. The WordPress admin is powerful and intimidating in equal measure. Here we built a separate password-protected area with four plain screens — shows, images, videos and subscribers — so the client can keep the site current without ever seeing a WordPress dashboard, and without being able to break the layout.
Because you rent them, and they all look like each other. A platform site stops existing the day you stop paying, the design is bounded by the template, and your mailing list lives on someone else's server. A hand-coded site is yours permanently, looks like nobody else's, and keeps the audience list where it belongs — with the artist.
Custom oEmbed handling. Rather than dropping raw embed codes on the page, the build checks whether a video can actually be embedded, falls back to a poster image when it cannot, and controls how and when the player loads. You get the video without the page waiting on a third-party player to decide whether it feels like appearing.
Five-page bespoke builds start from £999, with builds that include a client dashboard and custom content types priced on scope. Everything is hand-coded and owned outright — no monthly platform fee and no licence. See five-page website design for what is included as standard.
Yes. Mako Digital is based in Wigan and works across the borough and the wider North West, with clients from tradespeople to performers. See our Wigan web design page, or the case study archive for more examples.
Yes. Lauren Waterworth is a singer and singing coach working in Wigan and online. The live site is at laurenwaterworth.co.uk.
If the Lauren Waterworth build is the kind of work that fits you, these are the closest peers in our portfolio — personal brands and performance businesses, all hand-coded.
Bespoke personal-brand builds from £999+. Same approach as the Lauren Waterworth build — art direction that looks like nobody else's, a simple dashboard so you keep it current yourself, and an audience list that stays yours.
