Overview
My client, Ashleigh Warren, is a social media marketing strategist and founder of So Social, an advertising agency that has produced over $100 million in revenue for influencers, creators, artists, and brands. In her career, Ashleigh has worked with high-profile celebrities like Post Malone, Shawn Mendez, and Mike Tyson, and she also starred in the 2023 HBO show, “Swiping Across America.”
After working with me on a few projects prior, Ashleigh hired me in 2022 to brand, design, and develop a new membership blog in Webflow.
The blog, “Creators Internet,” published advice articles for social media content creators — from “How to Calculate Your YouTube Engagement Rate” to “5 Ways to Reduce Anxiety While Waiting on New Brand Deals.”
For this project, I designed and developed the site solo and also assisted in the brand creation.
bNote: In February 2023, my client had to temporarily put the Creators Internet venture on hold due to personal reasons.
Problem
The main goal of Creators Internet was to collect user emails by encouraging them to create a free account to read articles. At the time of the project, Webflow had no native capability to allow membership sites and gated content.
Solution
I used a third-party app, Memberstack, to allow the creation and management of user accounts. My client wanted users to have the ability to create an account or login using their Google or Facebook account. Fortunately, Memberstack had just added social login capability at the time of this project, so we were able to incorporate that feature as well.
For the site's look, my client generally wanted something with a modern, bold, clean, and slightly hipster look. To this end, for the site's headlines I chose a typeface, Roc Grotesk, that had a touch of hipster and quirkiness compared to others sans serifs. For the body font, I chose Inter, a very clean and neutral sans serif.
Gated member content
Using the Memberstack integration, we were able to gate full blog articles from users not logged into an account. The Memberstack backend allowed my client to collect, store, and manage user data. We were also able to seamlessly integrate Memberstack with Make, a third-party app my client used to manage email lists.
Uncluttered design
The business objective of Creators Internet was to funnel users to create an account to read content. With this in mind, I kept the design of the home page uncluttered and focused on the articles themselves. I worked with a team of graphic designers who created the graphic tiles for each blog. I wanted the graphic tiles to be the center of attention (much like YouTube's homepage includes minimal color outside the video tiles).
Gated member content
Using the Memberstack integration, we were able to gate full blog articles from users not logged into an account. The Memberstack backend allowed my client to collect, store, and manage user data. We were also able to seamlessly integrate Memberstack with Make, a third-party app my client used to manage email lists.
Uncluttered design
The business objective of Creators Internet was to funnel users to create an account to read content. With this in mind, I kept the design of the home page uncluttered and focused on the articles themselves. I worked with a team of graphic designers who created the graphic tiles for each blog. I wanted the graphic tiles to be the center of attention (much like YouTube's homepage includes minimal color outside the video tiles).
Results
My client was very happy with the blog's look, design, and build. One month after launching in November 2022, Creators Internet received over 1,500 organic member sign-ups, and that number continued to grow as we fleshed out our content strategy and increased our blog output. I continued to manage the blog and post content to the site after launching.
Note: In February 2023, my client had to temporarily put the Creators Internet venture on hold due to personal reasons.
"Matt is an extremely talented and detailed oriented web designer. We could not have completed this project without him."
Ashleigh Warren
Founder of So Social and star of HBO show "Swiping America"
