Network Ace: three decisions a template couldn’t make
Network Ace is a social tennis platform in London. The brief was a website that felt like a product, not a brochure about one. This is what that meant in practice: three decisions a template would have made for us, and made wrong.
1. The home page is an argument, not a menu
A template home page is a stack of sections: hero, features, testimonials, pricing, footer. We wrote the home page as one argument instead, in the order a sceptical player asks the questions: what is this, would I use it, who else does, how do I start. Every block answers the next question the last one raised.
The old site did its job. It was made with a website builder, so every change was slow, making it work on a phone was a job of its own, and there wasn’t room for everything they wanted to say. I kept the content of a few pages and started the rest from scratch, and gave as much of the site as I could to Network Ace itself and everything around it.
2. The brand had to feel organised and warm at the same time
Tennis brands pull two ways: club-traditional or sportswear-loud. Neither fits a product whose whole point is strangers trusting each other to turn up. Deep clay tones for warmth, orange for energy, and type and spacing kept deliberate, because a visitor decides in seconds whether they’d trust the platform with a real game.
The branding got clearer as the project went on. The colours were the one thing not up for debate, but we agreed four was too many and kept one: the clay orange from their logo. I wanted the site to land the moment it opened, so you get a feel for the brand and what Network Ace is about before reading a word.
3. Court pages, because that’s where the searches are
The decision with the longest tail. Instead of one page about the product, the site has a page per court and court reviews. Those pages are now appearing for local court searches the site never ranked for, and the court-review pages are among the twelve cited in Google’s AI answers. A template gives you a product page; it doesn’t tell you to build one per court.
The court-review pages were my suggestion. Network Ace was already reviewing courts in Instagram reels, and that was too good to leave on Instagram, so every review got its own page on the site, from Wimbledon Park to Bethnal Green Gardens.
What it adds up to
Search impressions doubled in the 120 days after launch (2,614 to 5,418). Twenty-six pages indexed, 501 AI citations across twelve of them, a 100 Lighthouse performance score on the home page on desktop (Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, May to September 2026). None of those came from a section a theme offers. They came from deciding what the site was for before deciding what it looked like.
If you’re building something that needs more than a shop or a brochure, this is the kind of work I do, and this is the service.
All notes