Case study
BirthdayNaija
A Nigerian birthday celebration platform. Members pay for a plan, submit a birthday card, a manager reviews it, and it goes live on a public Birthday Wall with its own shareable page.
See live websiteChallenge
The client wanted a slim, custom platform with no third party auth, no Firebase and no off the shelf CMS. Auth, database, payments and admin all had to live on their own hosting, lean enough for one team to maintain, with two experiences sharing one data model and strict role separation enforced on the server.
Approach
We started with the design system before any feature work, built the front end first so the client could test real screens early, then layered in a custom PHP and MySQL backend. Each stage, from auth to public site, admin, backend and payments, was tested by the client before the next began.
Two design systems
A warm orange to pink gradient brand with pill buttons for the public site, and a distinct blue system built from a dedicated Figma file for the manager admin. Both are token driven, documented, and never mix.
What we built
A public site with the Birthday Wall in grid and feed views, a member dashboard with submission tracking and plan aware posting, a manager admin for approvals, members, payments and reports, webhook verified Paystack payments with server side entitlements, and transactional email.
Outcome
Live on the client’s own infrastructure with continuous delivery from GitHub, live payments, and a site that is indexed and open to search engines.
Product surfaces
Public site, member dashboard and manager admin.
Design systems
One for the public brand, one for the admin, zero bleed.
Third party auth or CMS
Everything runs on the client’s own stack.
