The problem: one business, two websites to look after
Airlift Productions has a voice and a history worth keeping. Its business website introduced the New Orleans recording and voiceover practice, while a separate WordPress blog held years of stories, photographs, and recordings. Keeping them apart meant two sites to host and maintain, and a divided experience for readers moving between the work and the person behind it.
The brief was to bring those pieces together with a modern design, an experience that works across screen sizes, and a practical way for the owner to keep publishing. The archive needed to come with it.
The work: a shared home that still sounds like Airlift
I rebuilt the public experience with Astro on Azure Static Web Apps. Services, listening samples, studio photographs, and the blog now share one site and navigation. The design keeps Airlift’s parachute-and-crate identity and authentic photographs, including the original microphone portrait, while making the pages easier to read and explore on phones, tablets, and desktop screens.
The content stayed close to the owner’s voice and visual history rather than being forced into a generic template. Original studio imagery and captions remain connected to the stories they belong to, and owner review shaped the experience across desktop and mobile. Listening samples are treated as part of the work itself, with a clear standard for clean beginnings and endings.
The migration brought 161 blog posts into that shared home, retaining their content, dates, categories, tags, and published comments. Search, archive navigation, and links between stories help visitors move through the collection. The result connects the business offering to the years of work behind it.
A visual CMS with editorial control
A custom visual CMS puts everyday publishing in the owner’s hands. Choose a page or section, change the content, preview the result, save a draft, and publish—all within the site’s own editing experience.
The editor supports custom pages, navigation, and reusable sections for images, audio, video, quotations, and columns. Its media library brings existing archive assets and new uploads into the same editing workflow, so the owner can keep the wording, photographs, captions, and recordings under direct editorial control as the next story takes shape.
Media storage that fits the work
An audio business has more to carry than page text. Recordings and uploaded media use Azure Blob Storage, so the website can reference a dedicated media library. Images are prepared for responsive delivery with WebP, while original source assets are retained.
Historical audio addresses are mapped to their new storage locations. This keeps older links useful as the delivery model changes and gives the owner a route to add future media through the CMS.
Carrying URLs and metadata forward
The migration connects legacy blog addresses to the consolidated /blog/ section and carries historical media paths forward. Page and audio redirects, together with path mapping from the former blog hostname, help visitors follow older links into the new experience.
Canonical URLs, page descriptions, social-sharing metadata, RSS, and the sitemap give the consolidated content a consistent identity for readers and search engines.
Bringing back the owner’s preferred analytics
Clicky is back across the website and blog, bringing the owner’s preferred analytics tooling into the consolidated site.
One hosting setup to look after
The website and blog now share one Azure hosting setup. Bringing their public experience and publishing workflow together reduces the duplication of maintaining a separate website and blog and gives future updates a common home.
The result: a simpler place to visit and maintain
Airlift now has one responsive website for the business and its archive, a visual route for everyday editing, and media storage that supports its recordings. The owner can work on pages, navigation, and media within the same publishing experience.
The modern design and consolidated delivery address the original friction: a connected public experience and a clearer path for keeping it current.
Explore the Airlift Productions website or browse the consolidated blog.