A membership site is mostly an admin system that happens to have a public website attached. The part that decides whether it succeeds is renewals, not the homepage.
Signing a member up is the easy half. What tends to go wrong is everything after: renewal reminders that do not go out, a lapsed member who can still reach member-only content, a membership database that disagrees with the finance system, and staff quietly maintaining a spreadsheet to work round all of it.
So the questions worth answering first are not about design. What is a membership year — fixed, or a rolling twelve months from joining? What happens on the day somebody lapses? Can a member change tier mid-term, and what happens to the money if they do?
Those answers determine the build. Getting them wrong is expensive to correct later, because by then there are real members in real states that the system was never designed to express.
What we do
Working UK-wide — directly with businesses, and white label behind design and marketing agencies.
Discuss a projectSign-up that takes payment and creates the member record in one go, rather than leaving somebody to reconcile the two afterwards.
Automatic reminders, a renewal that takes a few clicks, and sensible handling of expired cards. This is where most membership income is actually lost.
Different levels seeing different things, with the rules held in one place rather than scattered through the site.
Documents, archives and resources genuinely restricted — not merely hidden from the menu while remaining reachable by anyone with the URL.
Member rates, capacity limits and attendance, which most membership organisations need and most off-the-shelf plugins handle awkwardly.
The member database staying in step with your CRM or finance system, so nobody has to decide which one to believe.
If your membership is one tier, one price and an annual renewal, existing plugins do that well and cheaply. Bespoke earns its cost when the rules are unusual, not by default.
Moving an existing membership base means carrying across renewal dates, payment mandates and historic entitlements. It needs planning and a rehearsal, and it is where these projects most often go wrong.
A membership system needs an owner who handles failed payments and queries. The software reduces that work; it does not remove it.
A lot of our work is delivered white label or under agreement, so these describe the problem and the approach rather than naming the client.
An API-connected membership platform handling publications, events and a two-way CRM sync — thousands of profiles and hundreds of transactions a week.
Membership · CRM syncA membership website for payroll professionals, with member benefits and book sales, kept in step with the client’s CRM by a bespoke two-way API integration.
Ecommerce · BookingsCourse booking and online payment for the training arm of a charity that runs a regional ambulance service.
The tiers, the renewal cycle, what members get, and what your team currently does by hand. Those answers decide the build far more than the design does.