Tiers Made Comparable
Differences visible at a glance rather than buried in matching feature lists.
Membership Website Design
Membership Website Design for the Tier Choice and the Member Area
Two screens decide whether a membership works: the page where someone chooses a tier, and the first thing they see after joining. Membership website design is the work on both — presenting tiers so the choice is easy, and structuring the member area so people find the value they paid for in the first session.
We Design the Two Screens That Matter
The tier choice decides whether people join. The first session decides whether they stay.
First Session Designed
What a new member sees, which predicts renewal better than anything else.
Value Made Findable
A member area where the thing they paid for is not three clicks away.
Public Pages That Sell
Enough shown to make joining a reasonable decision.
Honest Presentation
No fabricated member counts, testimonials or activity.
Membership Design, Explained
What Does the Design Decide?
Four things the visitor experiences, distinct from the system underneath.
Discuss Your Membership →- 1
The Tier Choice
How levels are presented, and whether the difference is obvious.
- 2
The Preview
How much is shown publicly, which is a judgement not a setting.
- 3
The First Session
What a new member does first, and whether it delivers.
- 4
Ongoing Navigation
Whether returning members find new material without hunting.
What a Membership Design Project Covers
The joining decision and the member experience after it.
Access control, billing and renewal mechanics are covered by membership website development.
How We Design Membership Sites
Design the join decision and the first session. The rest follows.
Define the Tiers
What each includes, expressed so the difference is obvious.
Decide the Preview
How much to show publicly, and which parts.
Design the First Session
What a new member does immediately after joining.
Structure the Member Area
So new material is visible rather than buried.
Design the Renewal Moments
Reminders and expiry as the member experiences them.
The Tier Choice
Why Matching Feature Lists Make Choosing Harder
Three columns of near-identical bullets is the most common tier presentation and one of the worst.
What goes wrong with parallel lists?
The reader has to compare three columns line by line to find the differences, which is work. Faced with that, many people choose the cheapest or leave.
The differences are usually few — two or three things separate the tiers — and burying them among fifteen shared items hides the actual decision.
Stating what each tier adds, rather than repeating everything it contains, makes the choice legible in seconds and usually moves people up rather than down.
How much should be visible publicly?
Enough that joining is an informed decision rather than a leap. A membership that shows nothing asks the visitor to pay to find out whether it is worth paying for.
The usual fear is that showing content removes the reason to join. In practice the reverse holds more often — a sample demonstrates quality, and quality is what people are buying.
Showing the structure is also worth more than showing a single item: how much there is, how it is organised, how often it is added to.
Questions,answered.
Membership website design covers what the member sees — how tiers are presented, how much is previewed publicly, the first session after joining, and how the member area is structured.
By what each one adds rather than as three parallel lists of mostly identical features. The differences are few and burying them among shared items hides the actual decision.
Enough that joining is informed. A membership showing nothing asks people to pay to find out whether it is worth paying for, and showing the structure and volume usually helps more than it costs.
Because members renew if they used what they paid for, and the first session predicts that better than anything else. It is also the part most often left as a default landing page.
This page covers what the visitor and member see. Access control, billing, renewals and failed payments are covered by membership website development.
Still deciding if membership website design is right for you?
Talk to UsFifteen Identical Bullets and Three Different Ones
Tier tables are built by listing everything each level includes, which feels thorough and gives every plan a satisfying column of ticks.
It also means the reader has to scan three near-identical lists to find the three lines that actually differ. That is real work, and work at the moment of decision is where people default to the cheapest option or none.
The information is all there. It is simply arranged so the one thing the visitor needs — what changes between tiers — is the hardest thing on the page to see.
Free Membership Review
Talk Through Your Tiers and Member Area
Tell us what members get and how the levels differ. We will look at how legible the choice is and what a new member sees first.
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