Giving Maqaam a digital home they could own

Maqaam Foundation works with artists with disabilities, creating spaces for their work to be seen, experienced and recognised.

When I met founder Niyaz Hussain through a mutual friend, Maqaam didn't have a website.

The work existed: artists, exhibitions, events, photographs, documents and years of stories. Most of it was scattered across Google Drive, Google Docs, Instagram and WhatsApp forwards.

So the job was more than putting Maqaam online. All of that work needed a home.

Instagram and WhatsApp were doing most of the work of communicating what Maqaam was doing.

That worked for quick updates, but it made the larger body of work behind the foundation hard to see. Artist stories disappeared into feeds. Past events were hard to find. Information lived across folders and documents.

Niyaz also needed a place where Maqaam's work could be presented properly as part of his application for a National Award.

So rather than a small brochure site, I started treating the website as Maqaam's growing archive.

The raw material wasn't sitting neatly inside a CMS. Niyaz had years of photographs, Google Drive folders, Google Docs and information collected through the foundation's work.

I went through that material and turned it into a structure that worked on the web. Two parts mattered most:

Artists: a growing collection where Maqaam could document the artists it works with and give their work a permanent place to be discovered.

Events: a record of exhibitions and programmes that could continue growing instead of disappearing after an Instagram post or WhatsApp forward.

This structure shaped both the website and the CMS behind it.

Building the website was only half of the problem. If every new artist, event or update required coming back to me, I would have simply replaced one dependency with another.

That became a constraint for the whole project.

I built Maqaam in Framer, with separate CMS collections for artists and events. Instead of editing layouts or touching code, Niyaz could add the information once and let the system handle the page. I then taught him how to use it.

I shouldn't need to be there for the website to keep growing.

Add an artist or event once

→

CMS collection

→

The page builds itself

Accessibility is already deeply connected to Maqaam's work.

So the website has accessibility controls that let visitors adjust it to their needs.

It wasn't added at the end as an extra feature. It became part of how the site represents the organisation.

I did the whole project on my own: organising the information, designing the site, and building the final website and CMS.

I also used Claude in the build, which let me move between designing, building and revising without a handoff from design to development.

For a small foundation, that mattered. The solution didn't need a large technical stack or a developer maintaining a custom CMS. It needed to be useful, manageable and sustainable.

By August 2026, Maqaam had gone from no website to a structured site of its own. Artists had permanent profiles. Events could remain discoverable after they ended. Years of material had a clearer structure. Niyaz could publish new content himself.

And Maqaam had one place to send people, instead of relying mostly on Instagram posts and WhatsApp forwards.

After launch the foundation saw more website visitors and wider visibility, but we weren't tracking enough analytics then to put a reliable number on it.

For me, that is also why the CMS matters as much as the interface.

The project wasn't finished when I published the website. It was finished when Maqaam could continue publishing without me.

Live → maqaam.in

The work leads, on every screen size. Exhibitions read as a record anyone can browse by city and year, and the accessibility controls sit in the header on every page, not in a footer link.