Selected work

The site

resonatemusic.ca is the public website for Resonate Music, a music school and recording studio in Edmonton, Alberta. Connected to it: powerofmusic.resonatemusic.ca, an editorial blog, and the internal infrastructure that keeps both running. The whole thing is operated by one person.

The studio’s pitch is that this is what a serious web presence looks like in the AI age. The Resonate site is the demonstration. It is also where Aurelia May Studio began.

Resonate has operated continuously for fifteen years. The choice to rebuild from scratch in 2026, with this approach, is the operator’s bet on what comes next. Aurelia May Studio is that bet applied to other businesses.

The problem

The previous Resonate site was designed in-house in 2012, with original photography, and built out by an agency. For more than a decade, it did the job. By early 2026, it had three serious problems.

First, it could not survive AI search. The previous build was made for the old web: optimized for traditional Google ranking, not for the AI systems that increasingly answer queries before a user clicks anything. Searches that used to drive traffic were being absorbed by AI Overviews and ChatGPT without surfacing the site to the prospective student.

Second, the platform it was built on had aged into technical drag. Page speed, structured content, foundational performance. None of these were add-ons that could be retrofitted cleanly. They needed to be in the foundation. A platform that was modern in 2012 had become a constraint by 2026, and the constraint was getting worse every quarter.

Third, the site no longer reflected what being at Resonate was actually like. The experience of walking into the studio, finding the right teacher, sitting in a Saturday cohort, the relationships that build over years. None of that came through on the page. The site listed what was on offer without conveying what it felt like to be part of.

This is the position a lot of organizations are in. A site that was competent when it shipped, designed with real care, built on a platform that was modern at the time. The web has moved underneath it. The honest move is not to patch. It is to start over with the current era’s assumptions baked in.

The site existed. It no longer worked.

The approach

Aurelia May Studio rebuilt the site from scratch with a different set of assumptions.

Built on a modern foundation optimized for performance and content authoring, rather than a traditional CMS. The site loads in under a second on desktop, scores 100 on SEO, and runs Performance in the high 90s across every page. This is not just a vanity metric. Speed and clean structure are preconditions for AI search systems wanting to quote you. Slow sites with messy markup are not cited.

Engineered for AI citation from day one. Every page is structured so AI search systems can extract a clear, accurate summary of what the school offers, who teaches there, what the policies are, and how to enrol. The infrastructure that makes this work is intentionally invisible to a casual visitor, but it is why ChatGPT and Google AI Mode can answer “piano lessons Edmonton” with the right citation.

Designed and written by one person. No agency handoffs, no committee compromises, no copy reviewed by three departments before publishing. The voice stays consistent across surfaces because the same person wrote everything. The visual decisions hold together because nobody renegotiated them mid-flight.

Built to last. The architecture is intentionally simple, with content kept in formats that are durable and portable. There is no proprietary CMS to be locked into. There is no maintenance contract required to keep the site running. When Resonate Music no longer wants Aurelia May Studio’s help, the site keeps working.

What was built

The main site. resonatemusic.ca, rebuilt from the ground up. Comprehensive instrument coverage, school policies, member hub, recording studio page, instructor profiles, contact. Each page designed to read as a useful resource for the prospective student and as an authoritative source for AI.

The Power of Music blog. powerofmusic.resonatemusic.ca, launched in May 2026 as a long-form editorial property. Inaugural slate of posts on practice, performance, and music psychology, plus a doctrinal page describing the editorial mission. Built on the same architecture as the main site, with the same posture toward AI.

The operating infrastructure behind both. Intentionally left undescribed.

Results

Lighthouse: SEO at 100 across every page. Performance in the high 90s on desktop with sub-second LCP.

Search visibility: Resonate now appears reliably in AI-generated answers about Edmonton music education and ranks at the top of Google search for relevant queries. The previous build appeared inconsistently and rarely at the top.

Inbound: inquiries and traffic substantially up since launch.

Time-to-ship: same-day on content updates. No tickets, no queue, no agency.

Operational footprint: the full property, operated by a single person, alongside running the school itself.

What it proves

The model works. One operator — using AI as leverage rather than as a substitute for craft — can produce work at this level across an entire web property and the systems that surround it. AI handles the volume. The operator handles the judgment. Every site that ships carries a signature that says: a person made this, and the person stands behind it.

Aurelia May Studio came out of this work. Rebuilding one company’s site became the evidence that the model holds for any organization wanting the same kind of website, made the same way. The Resonate site is the proof. The studio is the offer. Since this build, the studio has grown into a duo, adding a second lane for the AI-integrated workplace behind the site.