Do dead composers need websites? Of course they do! Perhaps they also need Facebook pages and twitter accounts, I wouldn't know about that. Well Peter Tranchell has had one for ages, running on free web hosting with up to four free pages, set up by John Gwinnell at www.patranchell.info. Or rather, he did have one, until...

I was contacted a couple of days ago by John G saying

I thought I'd check how the website is looking - it seems to have disappeared. ... especially in view of the forthcoming carol from St John's on Sunday ... it's a bit urgent. You do this sort of thing, don't you? Can you help?

Sure enough it really had disappeared. Even Google and Bings cached pages were showing up empty, so it must have been gone for some time. The thing with the coming Sunday is that a new arrangement of a Tranchell's "People, look East" (for SATB by Peter Marchbank) is in the Advent Carol Service from St John's on Radio 3, and we expect a surge of interest.

With an evening to spare I decided to help out, and used the opportunity to have a go with Orchard CMS. We had some fun re-pointing the domain at my hosting, and I had lots of fun with Orchard (maybe some other time I'll post on the pros and cons of Orchard vs mojoPortal).

Anyway, a new site has been created, with much richer content than the original. The address hasn't changed, it's still at www.patranchell.info. John G is feeding me fantastic content, and I have wired up all the essential pages like a biography, contact form, scans of some fantastic hand-written scoring from my copy of the Mayor of Casterbridge, list of published works and recordings, and work in progress on a listing of all known works.