Ten years, three releases, one hiatus, and the site survived all of it.
Parthian is a progressive death metal band formed in 2015. Empyria has built and maintained its website since the first release in 2016, through a hiatus, a relocation and roughly seven lineup changes. It is the longest-running site in this portfolio and the clearest evidence of what maintaining a site actually involves.
The bio paragraph problem
A band website has about four seconds to play something and roughly three jobs after that: sell a shirt, get the booking email, and tell a stranger who this is. Most band sites do none of it. They are a link tree, a streaming embed, and a Facebook feed that stopped updating in 2019.
The interesting failure is the third job. Almost every band site compresses its entire history into one bio paragraph, written once, in the present tense, by whoever was in the band that year. Then the lineup changes and the paragraph is wrong. Then a record comes out and the paragraph is wrong in a new way. After ten years the bio is either three sentences that say nothing or a wall nobody reads, and in both cases the actual history, which is the thing a label, a promoter or a journalist is trying to establish, has been thrown away.
Parthian has a lot of history to throw away. Formed 2015 by two friends. First EP Winter 2016. Tours with Lorna Shore, Miss May I and Ice Nine Kills. Lineup changes through 2017, then an indefinite hiatus in 2018 when the drummer moved. Founding members back in a room in 2022 to finish the debut album. An instrumental version in 2023. Mortuorum on April 20, 2025.
That is not a paragraph. That is a structure.
Five decisions, made once
History is structured, not summarized.
The band's story is a dated timeline with an entry per era, not a bio that has to be rewritten every time something happens. Adding a record or a lineup change is adding an entry, which takes two minutes and does not require anybody to reread and re-argue the whole thing. Ten years in, it is still accurate, which no bio paragraph on any band site anywhere is.
Play first, ask later.
Streaming and the current release are above anything that wants an email address or a click to a store. A visitor who arrived from a tagged photo has come to hear something, and a site that makes them decline a mailing list popup first is a site they have already left.
One store, not two.
Merch points at the storefront that already exists rather than a second checkout to maintain, reconcile and secure. A band is four people with day jobs. Every system you add is a system somebody has to babysit on a Tuesday.
One contact form for everything.
Booking, press, licensing and general mail arrive at one form with consent handled properly, because four specialized forms on a band site means three of them go unread for a year.
10 years, one voice.
Since the band was formed in 2015 I have been the only one who has built, maintained, and reiterated the content and design along with the underlying technology.
A bio paragraph is accurate for about eight months. A timeline is accurate for as long as somebody adds to it.
Why the history is structured
The build
5 pages on WordPress and Bricks with a custom child theme. No purchased theme, no builder license renewing in the background, and a site that has now outlived several generations of both.
- A structured band history, dated by era, which is added to rather than rewritten.
- A discography with an entry per release, including the 2023 instrumental version of the debut, which most band sites would have left off entirely.
- Streaming and social links in one place, maintained as data rather than hard-coded into a footer.
- A single contact form covering booking, press and general mail, with consent recorded properly rather than assumed.
- A shop link pointing to the existing storefront rather than a second commerce system.
What happened, without a percentage
It is ten years old and it is still correct. That is a low bar that almost nothing clears. Most sites built in 2016 are either gone, frozen, or have been rebuilt twice by three different people.
Every change since has been an addition, not a rebuild. Three releases, a hiatus, a return, and roughly seven lineup changes have all been absorbed by adding entries to structures that already existed. Nothing required starting over, because the structure assumed the band would keep happening.
It has been maintained by one person for a decade This is the part that transfers to a client who is not me. A care plan is not a line item, it is somebody still being there in year six when the PHP version changes and something quietly breaks. I have the receipts on that here and nowhere else.
And it taught me what actually rots Not the design. What rots is anything hard-coded, anything licensed, and anything that assumed the organization would stay the same shape. That lesson is in every site I have built since, and this is where I learned it.
Your field has its own version of this.
Every sector has three or four things its websites get wrong that cost real money. Finding them is the first half of the job. Tell me what you are building and you will hear back within one business day.