Association of Independent Celebrants

Our Solution

We built the public site first: a searchable, filterable celebrant directory with an interactive map view, shortlisting, and deep SEO-friendly profile pages carrying introductions, ceremony types, packages, credentials, galleries, video, testimonials, reviews and FAQs. A natural-language search bar turns a plain-English query such as 'wedding celebrant near Bath in July' into structured filters, with clarification prompts when a query is ambiguous. Dedicated ceremony landing pages, a supplier directory and fully CMS-backed institutional pages complete the public estate.

Membership was rebuilt as an end-to-end flow: a five-step application wizard with document uploads and admin-configurable fields, human-readable application references, four membership types including corporate groups trading under one business name, and a pricing engine that pro-rates by joining month across the April–March cycle. Approval provisions a login, issues a sequenced membership number, publishes the profile and fires a welcome email.

The payment layer was hardened properly. Checkout sessions are now minted on demand from a permanent pay route, so payment links never expire. Recurring subscription invoices are resolved and replayed into the renewals ledger, idempotent on invoice ID, via a nightly job plus an on-demand admin sync — a historical backfill recovered payments that had been silently missing from member records. Membership billing and the AI credit purchases run through cleanly separated payment accounts.

Members got a full portal: dashboard and performance panel, profile editor with drag-and-drop galleries, enquiries inbox, documents, messages, insurance and policies, marketing hub, perks and generated membership and insurance certificates. A photo studio handles cropping, adjustment, background removal and generative editing, and context-aware writing assistance is available on every long-form field — all metered against a credit balance.

Behind it sits an admin back office of around 30 screens: applications and form builder, full override control on every celebrant field with a pending-changes approval queue and diff view, document verification, financials and analytics with CSV export, bulk import, a scraping-based data enrichment pipeline for member and supplier websites, and recovery tooling for email deliverability and account drift.

Transactional email runs on a queue-backed system with scheduled dispatch, retry backoff, dead-letter handling, open tracking, bounce suppression and unsubscribe handling, across nine branded email types with admin-overridable templates. Enquiries are masked, so a member's private address is never exposed publicly. Security was designed in: sensitive columns sit behind public views, roles live in a dedicated table with a security-definer check, member documents use private storage, and content is sanitised against injection.