Join Blend

The core challenge of the Blend project wasn’t any single piece of functionality in isolation – it was the sheer number of distinct things the website needed to do simultaneously. And, the need for all of them to coexist within a design that felt premium and uncluttered.

Blend serves four fundamentally different types of visitor: prospective members exploring whether the community is right for them, event browsers looking for upcoming sessions, executives seeking educational content, and corporate partners and sponsors evaluating Blend at a business level. Each of these users has a different goal, a different starting point, and a different idea of what a successful visit looks like. The site needed to serve all four without any one journey creating confusion for another.

Beyond the UX complexity, the membership structure itself required careful rethinking. The original brief outlined three membership tiers, but through the discovery process it became clear that consolidating to two (Executive and Associate) would significantly reduce decision fatigue for prospective members and make the application flow far more intuitive. That decision, made early, shaped the architecture of a significant portion of the site.

Finding the right visual identity also proved more involved than anticipated. Blend’s audience is discerning, and the balance between corporate credibility, warmth, and luxury is a narrow one to strike. Getting the colour palette and typography right required genuine iteration before landing on a combination the client connected with. However, that investment paid off, because the visual foundation ultimately shaped everything that followed.

Addressing these challenges required clarity before creativity. The project began with a structured discovery phase designed to align on goals, define the site’s architecture, and ensure every subsequent decision had a clear rationale behind it.

Mapping the User Journeys

Before any design work began, user personas and journeys were mapped across four distinct pathways: New Member Acquisition, Event-Driven Interest, Education, and Corporate and Team Membership. A full sitemap was produced, and a project goals alignment workshop was completed with the Blend team. This also informed the decision to consolidate the membership tiers from three to two.

This upfront clarity meant that by the time the team moved into design, every section of the site already had a defined purpose and a defined audience. Nothing was designed in isolation.

Four Parallel User Journeys

The architecture of the site was built around the principle that different users should never feel like they’ve landed in the wrong place. Four clearly defined, parallel journeys were constructed, each with its own logic, calls-to-action, and conversion goal.

Prospective members are guided through Blend’s community proposition, the value of each tier, and into a structured application process. Event browsers can explore upcoming sessions, filter by location and type, and RSVP directly from individual event pages. Education seekers are routed towards Blend’s gated learning hub, with the content positioned as a premium, members-only benefit rather than a standard blog. Corporate partners and sponsors are directed towards a consultation journey, culminating in a Calendly booking rather than a form submission.

Each path has its own entry point, its own narrative, and its own endpoint. None of them interfere with one another.

By condensing from three membership tiers to two, the application journey became significantly more straightforward to design. With Executive and Associate clearly defined, the site could communicate the difference between them plainly and guide users to the right starting point without requiring them to navigate a complicated decision tree.

To handle the city chapter dimension (Blend operates across 12 locations, each with its own waitlist) a location-aware approach was built into the application flow. Each city chapter page triggers a pre-filled pop-up form with the relevant location automatically applied, removing a step that could otherwise introduce friction or error. Users don’t have to remember which chapter they were browsing; the site remembers it for them.

The membership application itself was built as a custom multi-step form, breaking the qualification process into structured, manageable steps. This approach reduces form fatigue significantly. Research consistently shows that multi-step forms convert at a higher rate than single-page equivalents, largely because they reduce the perceived effort required to complete them. For an audience as time-conscious as senior executives, that perception really matters.

A written and visual content plan was developed alongside up to 10,000 words of copy production. Keyword research and competitor analysis informed the SEO architecture from the outset too. Pages were structured around real search intent, with clear content hierarchies that support both user understanding and organic discovery. As with the technical build, search visibility was treated as completely foundational.

Platform Architecture & Integrations

A key part of the project was building a site capable of managing a substantial amount of interconnected content and functionality through a single, coherent CMS (Customer Management System).

The platform is built on a bespoke WordPress theme, developed from scratch to give complete control over templates, layouts, and editorial workflows. Six custom post types – Events, Education, Articles, Podcasts, Book Club, and Cities – each have their own front-end templates and their own CMS workflow, so the Blend team can manage every content type independently without one affecting another.

The bespoke calendar and events section was designed and built to support full search, location filtering, and individual event pages with speaker information, agendas, and RSVP functionality. Each RSVP feeds directly into HubSpot, keeping the CRM current without any manual handling.

Five bespoke forms cover every distinct conversion point on the site. These are Membership Application, Corporate Partnership, Sponsorship Enquiry, Event RSVP, and General Contact. Each is location-aware, detecting the page context and passing it through with the submission. Conditional logic determines both the submission route and the success page shown, so users receive a response relevant to their specific enquiry rather than a generic confirmation. All five pathways also feed into HubSpot, enabling consistent tracking, smarter lead segmentation, and more informed follow-up across every audience type.

The Blend Education hub is built as a separate, gated section (so, distinct from the Resource Centre) and positioned deliberately as a premium, members-only benefit. The Resource Centre itself was rebuilt with multiple custom taxonomies to support filtering and discovery across articles, podcasts, and book club content, each with its own template and structure.

The visual identity was one of the most carefully considered aspects of the project. Blend’s audience is senior, international, and used to quality. Therefore, the design needed to feel luxurious and authoritative without tipping into cold or inaccessible.

The final colour palette and typography represented a genuine creative achievement. Finding the right combination (one that balanced corporate credibility with warmth) required meaningful iteration, but the result is a confident, distinctive brand expression that holds up consistently across every page and every device.

Whitespace is used throughout as an active design tool. Given the volume of content the site carries, the discipline of letting content breathe was essential to

the premium feel. Dense pages would have undermined Blend’s positioning immediately; instead, information is revealed progressively, with hierarchy doing the work that clutter would otherwise occupy.
KIJO’s Animation Library was incorporated to add considered motion to the experience without overwhelming users. Animations serve the narrative rather than decorating it, guiding attention and reinforcing hierarchy as users move through the site.

The combination of considered architecture, a refined visual identity, and a technically rigorous build delivered a platform that handles significant complexity without ever showing it.

On launch, the site achieved Google Lighthouse scores that exceeded the 95+ target set out in the brief:

Performance 99 Accessibility 97 and, SEO 100

For a community built around the credibility of its membership, these scores matter beyond the technical. A near-perfect accessibility score ensures that Blend’s content is clear and usable for a global audience across every device. A perfect SEO score reflects a site built with discoverability at its foundation. And, a Performance score of 99 demonstrates that the richness of the design (the animation, the editorial layouts, the volume of content) was achieved without any compromise to speed or stability.

Supporting Core Web Vitals reinforce this score: a First Contentful Paint of 0.4s, Largest Contentful Paint of 0.9s, Total Blocking Time of 40ms, Cumulative Layout Shift of 0, and a Speed Index of 0.8s.

Perhaps the most meaningful result though, is structural. A site that serves four distinct audiences, each through their own clearly defined journey, without any one path creating friction for another, and with all feedback and form intelligently feeding back into the clients CRM, is not a simple thing to build. The fact it does feel straightforward to use is precisely the point.

You can experience Blend’s website here.