Overview
Making Unlimited Memories runs a mini soft play park hire service for ages 1 to 5 across South East London (Bellingham, Beckenham, Catford, Sydenham, and Bromley). I designed and built the full site end to end, covering brand-consistent design, product catalogue, and a real booking-and-payment flow, as a solo freelance engagement, from first line of code to a live deposit-taking checkout.
The brief was to give a small, hands-on business the kind of booking experience customers expect from much bigger operators, without the overhead of a full backend or ongoing hosting costs.
What I Built
- Deposit-only checkout via Stripe (Klarna wired in as an optional payment method), real card payments, not a stub
- Live availability calendar with per-day capacity limits, a short-notice cutoff, and an "enquire" fallback that routes tight or ambiguous dates to a contact form instead of blocking the sale outright
- Postcode-based delivery zone checker: free delivery inside named areas (and a buffer beyond them), mileage-based pricing outside it, using the free UK postcode API plus a Haversine distance calculation
- Password-gated admin pages for managing discount codes and blocking out dates, with no dashboard or database to maintain
- Netlify Forms-based contact form with spam honeypot protection
Why This Stack
The whole site is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with no build step, deliberately, to keep it cheap to host and easy for a non-technical owner to hand off changes for. Anything that genuinely needed a server, such as creating a real Stripe PaymentIntent or checking live booking counts, runs through small Netlify Functions instead of a full backend, with day-by-day booking counts held in Netlify Blobs rather than a database.
The site is currently live as a coming-soon page at its final domain while the full booking experience finishes rollout. The booking flow, payments, and admin tools above are already built and tested, not aspirational.