Illos Piano Restorations: Rebuilding a Buffalo Piano Shop's Website
A purchased Bootstrap 3 theme was loading 13 stylesheets and 18 scripts. We replaced it with one hand-written stylesheet and one vanilla JavaScript file. Here is what we built, and why.
What Illos Does
Illos Piano Restorations, Inc. is a family business at 2940 Main St. in Buffalo, restoring, rebuilding, tuning, moving and selling pianos since 1961. In their own words, they specialize in "restoration of Steinway, Baldwin and all vintage pianos."
Two facts shaped the build. The work is done in their own facility rather than subcontracted out, by a staff of woodworkers, finishers, movers, builders and tuners. And Joseph Illos is a Registered Piano Technician in the Piano Technicians Guild. That designation is his. The shop also restored the Steinway concert grand at Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin Complex, which is Illos's accomplishment, not ours.
Which is the design problem. The site serves a Buffalo neighbor who wants sheet music or a tuning, and an out-of-state owner deciding whether to ship a valuable instrument to a shop they have never seen.
What the Site Was Running Before
The previous site was built on a purchased Bootstrap 3 theme. Before a visitor saw anything, it pulled in 13 stylesheets and 18 scripts, and carried Revolution Slider, jQuery and Font Awesome along with them.
That is not a knock on anyone who worked on the site. It is what commercial themes do: satisfy every buyer, so every site pays for features it never uses.
The markup had concrete problems too. Three pages failed validation: an unmatched </p>, a <br> and a <b> as direct children of a <ul>, and an <li> never closed. We re-authored those pages from the copy rather than patch around them.
What We Built
The rebuild was completed on July 29, 2026. The front end is three files, confirmable in the page source:
- /css/site.min.css, about 25KB minified. One hand-written stylesheet for the whole site.
- /js/site.min.js, about 4KB minified. Vanilla JavaScript, no framework.
- /js/ada-widget.min.js, our accessibility toolkit.
That is the entire stack. No jQuery, no Font Awesome, no slider plugin, no Bootstrap. Icons became an inline SVG sprite instead of an icon-font download. Fonts are self-hosted, Open Sans variable plus Trirong, with no call to an outside host. The hero is a CSS fade slider over responsive WebP.
Be clear about what that list is: a description of what gets served. We did not measure before-and-after load times, so we will not imply numbers we do not have. Fewer files is a maintenance argument, less to update and less to break. That is how we build any small business website.
The Decisions, and Why
Serving both audiences without splitting the site
The restoration customer needs the shop's history, the in-house model and the Darwin Martin project early, because they are deciding whether to trust strangers with an instrument. The local customer needs hours, phone and address first. So the practical details sit up front and the depth stays one click away. That balance is most of what responsive design means.
Regional pages that turn work away
Because Illos accepts long-haul restoration work, the site carries twenty-five regional pages, from Rochester, Syracuse and Albany to Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Nashville, Chicago and Minneapolis, plus a service-area hub.
The honest description: each is framed for its own market with city-specific writing, over a shared passage on scope, because the scope is the same everywhere. What we like best is that they decline business. Each states that tuning and minor repairs there belong to a technician near the reader. A page that sends someone elsewhere is not a doorway page, and that is the instinct we bring to search engine optimization.
Structured data that only says what is true
The site carries a JSON-LD graph typed as both LocalBusiness and MusicStore, with the 1961 founding date, telephone, coordinates, hours and areas served. A separate FAQ block answers real trade questions, such as why a full rebuild is measured in months rather than weeks. There is no rating markup in it, because we do not mark up review scores.
URL hygiene and accessibility
Legacy .php URLs now 301-redirect to extensionless equivalents, and the bare domain redirects to www, so every page has one canonical address instead of several competing ones.
On accessibility: the site ships our accessibility toolkit, and the rebuild cleared a 65-issue list from our own site scanner. Read that precisely. A cleared scanner list is a fact about a scanner, not a legal conformance determination, and we will not call any website compliant. We tell you what was fixed, which is the only honest start to an accessibility conversation.
See It Live
The finished site is at Illos Piano Restorations, including a 360 degree virtual tour of the showroom, restoration shop and printed-music room that we also produced. It appears first in our portfolio.
Thinking About Replacing a Theme-Built Site?
If your site runs on a purchased template and plugins keep breaking, we will look at what it actually loads and tell you what a rebuild involves.
Our website design service page explains what a project with AldoMedia includes, how it runs from the first meeting to launch, and how timing and pricing work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Illos Piano Restorations rebuild actually replace?
A purchased Bootstrap 3 theme that loaded 13 stylesheets and 18 scripts, plus Revolution Slider, jQuery and Font Awesome. The rebuilt site serves one hand-written stylesheet, one vanilla JavaScript file and our accessibility toolkit. That is a description of the asset stack, not a speed claim.
Why hand-write a site instead of buying a theme?
A commercial theme ships every feature every buyer might want, and each site pays for it in files it never uses. Hand-written CSS and JavaScript means the site carries only the code it runs, with no third-party plugin to break when it stops being maintained.
Does AldoMedia claim the Darwin Martin Steinway restoration or the piano credentials?
No. The Darwin Martin Complex Steinway restoration, the Registered Piano Technician designation held by Joseph Illos, the Piano Technicians Guild membership and the 1961 founding all belong to Illos Piano Restorations. AldoMedia built the website that presents them.
Is the rebuilt site ADA compliant?
We do not use that phrase, and you should be careful with anyone who does. The site ships an accessibility toolkit, and the rebuild cleared a 65-issue list from our own site scanner. A cleared scanner list is a fact about a scanner, not a legal conformance determination.