Websites for music schools and academies

Freedom35 Web Design builds custom websites for music schools and lesson studios. The build is free and takes about seven days; you keep the site on an annual plan — typically $600 a year for a school, $1,200 when it needs enrolment, payments and portals. We have built exactly this kind of site before, it is live, and you can click through it below.

What does a music school website actually need?

Strip away the design talk and the job is concrete. Parents arrive with three questions: what do you teach, when, and how do I sign my child up. The site's work is answering those and then getting out of the way.

• A class catalogue people can filter. Instrument, age group, day of the week. If a parent has to scroll a PDF to find Tuesday piano for a seven-year-old, some of them won't.
• Live availability. A class that is full should say so before a family gets emotionally attached to it.
• Online enrolment. Signing up at 9pm on a Sunday, because that is when parents do this sort of thing.
• Card payments. Chasing cheques is a part-time job nobody at a school wants.
• The paperwork, online. Waivers, media releases, medical forms. On paper these get lost, photographed badly, or handed in half-filled. Online they are signed once and stored.
• Something for instructors. Rosters and attendance, somewhere that isn't a group chat.

A plain lesson studio — one teacher, a schedule, a contact form — needs less than this, and we will say so rather than sell you machinery you won't use. But a school enrolling dozens of families needs most of the list, and most template sites deliver none of it.

What this looks like built: Mustard Seed Music and Arts Academy

Mustard Seed Music and Arts Academy is a real client, and the site is live at mustardseedmusicandartsacademy.com — go and click around it. A new academy, opening with more ambition than infrastructure, needed the whole list above from day one. What we built, on the Pro plan:

• A class catalogue with filtering and live seat counts
• Online enrolment with card payments
• A family portal where each household manages its own students — including the waiver, media release and medical forms, signed online
• An instructor dashboard with rosters, attendance and lesson planning
• An admin back office with enrolment numbers and a bookkeeping ledger for the owners

That last item matters more than it sounds. A school's website and its admin work are usually two separate systems held together by a spreadsheet. Here they are one thing: a parent enrols on the site, and the roster, the attendance sheet and the ledger already know.

We are deliberately not quoting performance numbers or enrolment figures here — we publish measured numbers or none, and the detailed case study is pending the client's sign-off. The site itself is the evidence, and it is one click away. More on the build is on our work page.

Should you just use a template platform?

Maybe. Honestly — if you are a single teacher who needs a page with a bio, a schedule and a contact form, a Wix or Squarespace site you make yourself is cheaper than us and perfectly adequate. The comparison only gets interesting when the site has a job to do.

The pattern: template platforms win on immediacy and lose on machinery. Every capability a school needs beyond pages — enrolment, seat counts, family accounts — is an add-on, a plugin, or a second subscription, each one another login and another monthly fee. We build it as one piece because we write the code ourselves.

What does a music school website cost?

The build is free on every plan — you see the finished site before you pay anything. Then:

• Business, $600 a year, is typical for a school: up to 12 pages, lead capture, SEO basics done properly, and 12 update requests a year for schedule changes and new terms.
• Pro, $1,200 a year, is the Mustard Seed shape: everything above plus enrolment, card payments, family accounts and the dashboards. Pro is built in two stages — the website first, free, then the machinery once you are on the plan, usually two to four weeks.

Plans are prepaid annually with a 12-month minimum, and the price you start on is locked for as long as you stay. Your domain is bought in your own name, direct from the registrar — about $12–15 a year, and here is why that matters. The full process, stopping points included, is on how it works, and the seven-day timeline is broken down day by day here.

Questions schools ask us

Who updates the schedule every term? We do. An update request is one email with any number of small changes, done together — new term dates, a class added, an instructor page updated. Business includes 12 a year, Pro 24, and the allowance runs by the year so a quiet summer doesn't waste them.

Do we have to handle card numbers? No. Payments run through your own Stripe account — card details go to Stripe, not to you and not to us. Stripe's processing percentage is the one cost that isn't ours to waive, and we say so up front rather than bury it.

What happens to our enrolment data if we ever leave? It is yours. Stop paying and the site comes offline at the end of your paid term, but on request you get a zip of your content and the customer data the site collected, in open formats, within 10 business days. Your domain stays yours throughout, because it was registered in your name from day one.

How long does the build take? About seven days for the website itself, on every plan. For a Pro school, the machinery — enrolment, payments, portals — follows in two to four weeks once you are on the plan. The day-by-day timeline is here.