athlonesfinest.com: built so the organiser actually sends the link

A post-tournament player survey surfaced two findings independently across multiple respondents, without prompting: refereeing quality and schedule clarity. Schedule findability scored 5.6 out of 10, the lowest measured question, with the majority of respondents scoring it 4 or below. Those two complaints went directly into the information architecture. A section called Two Things sits below the hero and addresses both head-on, not buried in an FAQ.

A subtler finding shaped everything else. Asked how likely they'd be to recommend the tournament, respondents averaged 7.8. Asked how likely they'd be to play again themselves, that dropped to 7.2. The tournament was working. The problem was the act of re-organising. Someone has to propose it to the group chat, absorb the social risk of nobody responding, then chase eight people for their share of 100 euro.

Three personas shaped the design. The Reluctant Organiser, 21 to 24, has captained before and knows the admin burden. He'd recommend the tournament readily. He's slower to be the one organising it again. The Lapsed Player, 18 to 22, needs a low-pressure on-ramp and doesn't want group chat silence when he floats the idea. The University Team Captain has a full squad ready and just needs dates and format fast. All three hit the same wall at the same point in the customer journey: one person has to actually send the message. Every design decision traces back to reducing the cost of that moment.

The page structure follows the customer journey rather than a standard marketing template. I wireframed and prototyped the layout around the order a visitor would have questions, not the order I wanted to present information. The hero establishes where they are and why they should care. The Two Things section addresses refereeing and schedule clarity directly, because answering a real complaint does more credibility work than any marketing claim. Following sections cover format, what's included, real stats and past champions, testimonials, FAQ, and a final registration section.

The share mechanic came directly from the social-risk finding. Send this to your team sits next to the Register CTA because the captain's real problem isn't deciding whether to enter. It's convincing the group chat. The button opens a pre-filled message with the tournament name, date, venue, price per team, and registration link already written out. One tap replaces an effort a lot of organisers decide not to bother with at all. Price is shown per team, not per player, so there's no arithmetic before forwarding. That is conversion rate optimization applied to a social problem, not a checkout problem.

Below the hero, a spots counter shows a real, manually updated number. Genuine scarcity builds trust. Manufactured countdown timers destroy it. This audience has good pattern recognition for the difference.

Most sign-up forms are designed for individual users. This one registers a team of eight. That changes the conversion rate optimization problem. The captain filling in the form is committing money and organising people, and if the form feels long or confusing, they close the tab and the registration never happens.

The funnel collects team name, captain details, squad names, county and referral source. A progress bar across the top breaks the form into three visible stages: Team Details, Squad, Payment. On mobile, an unbroken form feels endless. Showing three short steps reduces the perceived effort before a single tap is made. No account creation, no email verification, no password. Returning teams can opt to be named publicly, which feeds the recognition strategy in post-event content.

Before Stripe, the tournament relied on delayed payments. A team would register, then I would send the payment link manually afterwards. When there was a gap of more than an hour between sign-up and receiving the link, the drop-off was real: two teams gave no response at all, one paid later the same day, and I had to chase two others before they eventually paid. That friction cost registrations.

The fix was integrating Stripe directly into the registration flow so payment happens at the point of sign-up, not after it. When the payment step sat inside the form itself, the drop-off disappeared. Every squad paid immediately. Confirmation email fires automatically with a calendar attachment for the tournament date. The whole flow takes under two minutes. I tested the form on mobile first because that is where the majority of this audience lands from social ads, and every layout decision, from button placement to input sizing, was designed for thumb reach on a phone screen.

The majority of the audience arrives from social ads on a phone. Every layout decision started mobile and scaled up, not the other way around. Primary actions sit within thumb reach from first scroll. A sticky CTA bar appears on scroll so the registration button is always accessible. Touch targets are 44 pixels minimum. Load times are fast because the site is prerendered to static HTML and served from Cloudflare Pages.

The visual direction resolved down to a single idea: a night match under floodlights. The screen is the dark of a stadium. The content is lit as if by floodlight. The layout is drawn in chalk like pitch markings. Pitch Black (#070F24) and Midnight Navy (#0D1B3E) take up 90% of the page. Chalk White (#F4F7FB) carries all the work an accent colour normally would: headlines, numbers, primary buttons. Depth comes from stepping through navy values, not from shadows or gradients.

Bebas Neue, oversized and stacked, is the hero's personality. Set large with tight line-height, left-aligned. Barlow Condensed handles subheads, labels and buttons. Barlow handles body copy. No two consecutive sections share the same composition. The hero is left-aligned, not centred. Real photography only. Stock football imagery reads as fake to this audience, and the UX research was clear that inauthenticity costs trust that is very hard to rebuild. The hero uses a real looping clip from Cushla Park. The gallery is actual match-day photography. Testimonials are left close to how they were actually said, unpolished on purpose.