The Unicorn Club
A boutique matchmaking and relationship consulting business for exceptional people.
The Unicorn Club is a matchmaking and relationship consulting business run by its founder & president Emily Paul.
Its goal is to bring people together by providing its clients tools to help them find “lasting partnership.”
The Challenge
The original Unicorn Club website was built on Wix by Emily herself. While a good starting point to gain presence on the web, Emily soon realized that Wix wasn’t good enough for her ever growing business needs (at the time of writing at least, 2016):
- There’s only so many features / customization tools available which means you’re limited to the functionalities Wix offers natively.
- If you ever decide to move your website from Wix to another service/platform you can’t export your data, design and contents – you’ll have to start from scratch.
- The design of the site felt outdated and overall not very professional.
It was time for a change.
Strategy Phase
Emily wanted a website with a more clean, modern looking, minimal design. Transitioning from Wix to a more professional looking website as soon as possible was also a top priority as she felt she was losing potential new customers due to the lack of appeal of the old website.
“All I want is a place where people can learn about the Unicorn Club and get in touch with me.”
The solution was simple: a minimalist, elegant landing page where people could quickly access the necessary information about the club and get in touch with Emily via a simple contact form.
This would allow to make a quick transition to a more professional website while providing space for future features / upgrades.
Designing and building of the new Unicorn Club website
Sebastian Garanton, a very talented designer and illustrator, was in charge of designing the new website – a clean, mobile friendly look & feel:
My role in this project was primarily to support Sebastian in front-end brainstorming, in advising on UX / UI best practices, and finally in converting that beautiful design from PSD into a fully functional, mobile-friendly website.
The website itself is just a static HTML5 file that follows the latest web standards at the time (2016). We avoided using Bootstrap or similar solutions in this project because, while useful and convenient, we really weren’t going to use most of the features these CSS frameworks have to offer. We wanted to keep the website as lean as possible for maximum performance.
The only dynamic part of the website is the contact form: we’re using PHP and JavaScript to send the message to Emily’s inbox via AJAX to avoid having to refresh the page when the visitor submits the form.
Hopefully the project will expand into a larger site in the future. If so, I’ll update this article 🙂