Overview
Making Unlimited Memories hires out mini soft play equipment for ages 1–5 across South East London (Bellingham, Beckenham, Catford, Sydenham, and Bromley) for birthday parties, community events, and pop-up play mornings. I built and continue to maintain the full site as a solo freelance engagement: not just the initial build, but the live operational system the business runs on day to day.
The brief evolved from "a working checkout" into a small platform: automated deposit and damage-deposit handling, scheduled customer communications, a delivery-zone engine, and an internal toolset that lets the owner manage discounts, availability, and marketing links without touching code.
What I Built
- Deposit-based Stripe checkout, with an automated damage-deposit authorization hold placed 3 days before each event and a staff tool to capture or release it after inspection
- A delivery-area zone checker: postcode lookup and Haversine distance calculation determines whether an address falls inside the free-delivery radius, with the same logic shared between the homepage checker and checkout so the result is always consistent
- Scheduled, automated emails via Resend: balance-due reminders at 7 and 2 days before an event, damage-deposit hold confirmations, and an internal alert when a listed event's date has passed and needs archiving
- A live booking-availability calendar and real-time add-on stock limits, both enforced server-side, not just in the UI
- A password-gated internal admin suite (5 tools): discount-code generation, availability/date-blocking, custom package-adjustment links for individual customers, damage-deposit management, and a UTM link builder for tracking social/QR campaign traffic
- GA4 and Meta Pixel wired in across every customer-facing page, with Purchase/Lead conversion events tied to real booking and contact-form data
- Netlify Forms-powered contact form (honeypot spam protection) and a newsletter signup (Brevo) issuing single-use discount codes
- Client-side PDF invoice generation for each booking
Why This Stack
No framework, no build step: just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with Netlify Functions handling
everything that needs a server (payments, email, scheduled jobs) and Netlify Blobs standing in for a
database. For a single-owner business with no dedicated dev team, that's a deliberate trade: the
entire site runs on Netlify's free/low tier, deploys are a single git push, and there's
no framework version, dependency tree, or ORM for a future developer (or the owner themselves) to
inherit and get stuck on.
The same philosophy carries into the admin tools: rather than a generic CMS, each internal tool does exactly one job the business actually needs, such as generating a code, blocking a date, or building a tracked link, kept deliberately small and legible rather than a general-purpose dashboard nobody but a developer could extend.
Status: live and in active use. The business runs its real bookings, payments, and customer communications through this system today; a companion WordPress install handles standalone SEO landing pages, kept fully decoupled from the booking/checkout system itself.