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Understory

Made by Understory

Understory

EventsPagesPeople

Deep roots for sites that gather people.

Step beneath

What it is

In a forest, the understory is the layer beneath the canopy — where most of the growing actually happens.

Understory is that layer for websites. One carefully built platform — pages, events, bookings, members, forms, payments — that each site is planted into and grown from, rather than rebuilt from scratch.

Every site keeps its own name, its own colours and type, its own domain and its own data. What they share is the part visitors never see: the scheduling that gets timezones right, the waitlists that fill themselves, the emails that arrive when they should, the admin that stays out of the way.

It isn't a product you sign up for. Each site is set up, migrated and looked after by the people who built the platform — which is a slower way to do it, and the reason it holds.

The work

Four things a site does when people gather around it — publish, gather, belong, and be tended.

Publish

Pages, posts and everything that holds them together — edited in place, in your own words.

  • Pages built from blocks

    A block editor with sections, patterns and live preview, so a landing page, a long read and a plain page all come from the same calm toolkit.

  • A blog that behaves

    Posts, categories and menus that stay organised, with redirects for anything that moves.

  • Found by the right people

    Clean URLs, sitemaps, social previews and structured data are part of the soil, not an afterthought.

Gather

Events are the heart of it — from a single workshop to a calendar of hundreds across countries and timezones.

  • Events, venues, presenters

    Scheduled events with timezone-correct times, real venues on real maps, and the people leading them given proper billing.

  • Bookings and waitlists

    Seats that confirm, waitlists that fill themselves, calendar downloads, and the right email arriving at the right moment.

  • Ask the right questions

    A form builder for registration questions and enquiries, with every answer kept and exportable.

Belong

Members, attendees, communities — whatever your people are called, they get accounts worth having.

  • Accounts without friction

    Sign-in with passkeys and two-factor security built in, and a profile where members find their own bookings.

  • Memberships and payments

    Subscriptions and paid places handled through Stripe, with member-only content gated cleanly behind them.

  • In their language

    Full multi-language support — translated pages, localised URLs — for organisations that cross borders.

Tend

The unglamorous work that keeps a site healthy for years, done properly and mostly invisibly.

  • Your look, your type

    An editable palette, a curated font library and per-site templates — every site its own species, same root system.

  • Careful hands on the data

    Imports and exports with dry-runs and backups, an activity log of every change, and roles so people only touch what's theirs.

  • Looked after, not left

    Because every site shares one platform, improvements and fixes reach all of them — tended by the people who built it.

“Most of a forest's life isn't in the canopy. It's in the layer beneath — sheltered, steady, quietly doing the work.”

In the wild

Every site its own species — different names, colours and countries, one root system.

Enquire

Grow a site on Understory

Understory suits organisations that gather people — communities, associations, practices, clubs — and want a site that handles events, bookings and members without a tangle of plugins. If that sounds like yours, write and tell us what you're growing.

hello@madebyunderstory.com

Each site is set up and cared for personally, so we take on a few at a time.