dan Some projects are about making something easier. Some are about preserving something that would otherwise be lost.
BJJ Bloodline — which we just launched — is the second kind.
For an art as deeply traditional as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, lineage is identity. Every black belt can trace their training back through their teacher, their teacher’s teacher, and on to the founders who brought the art from Japan to Brazil in the early 1900s. But until now, that record has lived in memory, in word of mouth, in scattered records across gyms and federations. The chain has always been there — there just hasn’t been a place to see it whole.
That’s what BJJ Bloodline set out to build, and that’s what we helped them ship.
The brief, in one paragraph
A digital “Hall of Records” — searchable, verified, community-maintained — that maps every teacher and student in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from the founding generation down to the practitioners on the mats today. Not a social network. Not a highlights reel. A historical document the community builds together.
We came in to handle design and development end-to-end: brand voice, visual system, custom WordPress theme, the bloodline application itself, the verified-contributor account system, payments integration, and a security posture that could be trusted by world-class instructors putting their names on the platform.
Where the interesting work lived
A project like this is mostly invisible work. The features you can list in five seconds — a teacher search, a profile page, a registration flow — sit on top of weeks of decisions about how the system should actually behave. A few of those decisions are worth talking about.
Designing trust into the contributor model
The hardest design problem on BJJ Bloodline wasn’t a screen — it was a question. Who is allowed to edit a teacher’s profile?
If anyone can edit, the record becomes a Wikipedia, with all the credibility tradeoffs that come with that. If only the BJJ Bloodline team can edit, the record never gets accurate at scale — they’d need to verify ten thousand profiles by hand.
The answer was a verified-claim model. Every teacher on the tree starts as an unclaimed profile, populated from research. When a teacher arrives, they search for themselves, claim their entry, verify their identity through a manual review process, and then have editing rights over their own page — including who they promoted, who their students are, and how their story is told. The community fills in the record, but only people who belong to a profile can shape it.
Designing this flow meant thinking carefully about the moment of friction: a black belt arrives, finds themselves on the tree, and now has to register, verify their email, and submit a claim. That’s a lot of steps for someone who just wanted to see their name. So we built the claim and registration paths to feel like one continuous motion — register, verify your email, land exactly back on the profile you were trying to claim. No re-finding, no remembering where you were.
Small detail, big impact.
A modal auth experience that doesn’t break the mood
Most WordPress sites send you to /wp-login.php to log in. Most WordPress sites’ login pages look like they were designed in 2008.
We didn’t want a single moment in the BJJ Bloodline experience to feel like generic WordPress, so the entire login and registration system is custom-built and lives inside a single modal in the site header. AJAX login, AJAX registration, AJAX resend-verification, all without leaving the page you came from. Tabs let you switch between login and register without losing your place.
It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that makes the difference between a site that feels designed and a site that feels assembled.
Real security, layered
Once you have user accounts, you have an attack surface. We took it seriously.
The auth system runs nonces on every AJAX request, honeypot fields on every form, and reCAPTCHA v2 on registration to defeat scripted account creation. The login endpoint has IP-based rate limiting — five failed attempts and you’re sat down for fifteen minutes — which is the single most effective defense against the credential-stuffing attacks that most sites never bother to protect against. Email verification tokens use timing-safe comparison (hash_equals) and expire after 24 hours. The admin bar and /wp-admin are completely locked down for non-admin roles so users never accidentally end up in the WordPress dashboard.
None of these things show up in a feature list. All of them matter.
A custom theme, from zero
There are no page builders, no premium themes, no Elementor or Divi anywhere in this project. Every template, every component, every piece of CSS was written from scratch on top of Bootstrap 5. That’s a craft choice — it gives us full control over performance, accessibility, and how the site ages over the next decade. Page builders are great for getting something live in a weekend. They’re terrible if you’re trying to build something that should outlast the team that made it.
The site is also entirely responsive, with off-canvas mobile navigation, an off-canvas search panel that works on every device, and a profile dropdown that adapts gracefully to whether you’re logged in.
AJAX live search across the whole archive
The search experience on BJJ Bloodline is a single keystroke-driven panel: tap the magnifying glass anywhere on the site, start typing, and results appear in real time across teachers and pages. Every interaction is asynchronous — no page reloads, no waiting on the WordPress search template.
For a site whose primary value is finding someone in the tree, the search needed to feel instant. It does.
The stack
For the engineers reading: WordPress with a fully custom Bootstrap 5 theme, Advanced Custom Fields for structured content, Gravity Forms and Stripe for payments, custom PHP for the bloodline application and auth layer, and vanilla JavaScript for the AJAX flows. No bloat, no compromise on control.
What we’re proudest of
The honest answer: the parts of the project nobody will ever notice.
The way the verification email knows where you were trying to go before you registered. The fact that the rate limiter resets cleanly when you finally type the right password. The way the honeypot fields are perfectly invisible to screen readers. The 404 page that knows it’s part of a site about lineage and leans into it (“This page has no lineage”).
Those are the details that make a site feel like it was made by people who care about it. And BJJ Bloodline is the kind of project that deserves to feel that way — because it’s preserving something that matters to a lot of people, and it’s going to be around for a long time.
See it live: bjjbloodline.com
Working on something with similar ambition — an archive, a platform, a tool that needs to be built right? Get in touch.
