A creative collective's new website in four days, and its community off Kajabi and onto Ummah.
Kufi Productions makes documentaries, animation and events, and runs Kufi Circle, a community for Muslim creatives. Brother Salman Hasan was paying WordPress, a developer, Kajabi and a ticketing tool for pieces of one thing. Four days after we sat down together, his new site was live on kufiproductions.com and Kufi Circle had a home on Ummah.
from the first conversation to a live site on their own domain
members in Kufi Circle on Ummah at launch
in place of Kajabi, WordPress and an $80-a-month developer
A media collective that tells the stories nobody else was telling.
Kufi Productions is a Muslim-led media collective founded by Brother Salman Hasan, with a second home in New York under co-founder Hosneara Begum. They make documentaries, animation and investigative pieces, produce events for masajid, non-profits and businesses, and host The Treaded Path, a podcast about how Muslim professionals got where they are.
They put on KufiCon, a summit for Muslim creatives, changemakers and storytellers. And around all of it sits Kufi Circle, the community Salman has been building for creators, artists and students: a place to learn from people already doing the work, find collaborators, and get to Kufi's services without a cold email.
It started with KufiCon, and ended up being about the community.
We met in person. Salman walked us through KufiCon and the setup behind it: tickets through Ticket Tailor, which charges on every ticket sold before the card processor takes its own cut. We put that next to Ummah, where the platform fee is a small percentage added at checkout and the organizer banks the full face value of every ticket. On a paid event, that is money Kufi keeps that it was giving away.
Then the conversation moved to what he actually wanted. KufiCon is one Saturday a year. What Salman wanted was the other 364 days: a community of creators and artists who engage with each other, who show each other their work, and who can reach Kufi's services and mentors from inside it. That is the part of the job no ticketing tool does, and the part Ummah was built for.
Four bills, each for a slice of the same job.
The website was WordPress, built page by page in Elementor and held together by a developer Salman paid $80 a month to keep it standing. Changing a line of copy meant a message, a wait, and an invoice.
Kufi Circle lived on Kajabi, a course platform whose cheapest plan runs $143 a month on an annual term, allows one community, and stops at 2,500 contacts before the price goes up again. A community that is meant to grow was on a tool that charges for growing.
KufiCon's tickets ran through Ticket Tailor, with its fee on every sale. Add hosting for a 4.8 GB WordPress install, and Kufi was paying four companies for what is, from where Salman sits, one thing: a place for people to find Kufi, join it, and show up.
A conversation on Monday. Live on kufiproductions.com by the weekend.
We did not start with a template, and we did not start with a blank page either. We started with everything Kufi already had: every page, post, profile and photo on the old site, their black and yellow, and their own footage for the hero. The first full version was online for review the night we met.
The review was not about whether it looked right. It was about who the home page is for. Fatima, on their team, made the case that it had too much on it and that the organizations who hire Kufi should come first. So the page now leads with the work, the services and the testimonials, and ends on Kufi Circle and an invitation to join.
Four days after that first conversation the site was live at kufiproductions.com, on Kufi's own domain and their own hosting, with a week to spare before KufiCon.
Own your narrative, on a site that looks like it means it
Kufi's black and yellow, their own footage behind the headline, and the partners who build with them right under it. The events and membership on the site come straight from their Ummah account.
- Built in Kufi’s brand, with their own film in the hero
- Ummah events widget and membership form on the page
- Same addresses as the old site, so nothing Google knew went dead
One home for the community, with no ceiling on how big it gets.
Kufi Circle now lives on Ummah. Its public page carries the feed, the events, the programs and the membership tiers, and the Join button on kufiproductions.com opens the Ummah membership form, with the questions Kufi wrote for it. At launch the community already had 138 members.
Members get what Salman described: a feed and groups to share work and find collaborators, events to meet at, and Kufi's workshops and services one tap away. Kufi gets one list of everyone, broadcasts by email, push notification and SMS, and no number of members at which the bill changes. Every Ummah plan includes unlimited members.
Kufi Circle's public page on Ummah
Where new members land: the cover, the member count, the events, and the story of why Kufi exists. The same account feeds the widgets on their website, so the site and the community never disagree.
- Feed, groups, events and programs in one place
- Join questions Kufi wrote, answered on the way in
- Email, push and SMS broadcasts to everyone, or to a group
- Unlimited members on every Ummah plan
Free to join, with paid tiers for the people who want more
Joining Kufi Circle is free. Three paid tiers, from Kufi Member to Founding Member, add private screenings, industry guides and townhalls with the Kufi team. Members choose a tier on Ummah and pay through Kufi's own payment account.
- A free tier and three paid tiers, each described in Kufi’s own words
- Member records, tiers and renewals next to the events
- The website links straight to the membership page
They edit the site on the page itself, and publish from their own admin.
Kufi's admin runs at its own address, in their colours, and belongs to them. Open a page, hover a section, change the words in place, move it, or take it out. Posts, the team, job listings and Treaded Path profiles live in their own collections, and the contact forms on the site land in an inbox inside the same admin.
Press publish, and the change is on kufiproductions.com. No developer, no ticket, no monthly retainer. The bigger changes still come to us, which is the arrangement Salman wanted: his team keeps the site current, and we keep it good.
What else the site had to get right
Nothing lost from WordPress
Thirty-three pages, fifty-eight posts, twenty-seven Treaded Path profiles, twenty-four event write-ups, the team and the job board all came across at the same addresses, with redirects for the rest. All but eleven sentences of the old site survived the move, and those eleven were rewritten on purpose.
Two audiences, one home page
Organizations that hire Kufi come first: the work, the services, the people who vouch for them. Then the creatives and students Kufi Circle is for. Their team asked for that order on the walkthrough call, and the page was reflowed the same night.
Fast on a phone
A WordPress install of some twenty-five thousand files became 840 static ones. No plugins to update, nothing to patch, and every one of the 165 pages checked at phone width before launch.
Their domain, their hosting, their admin
kufiproductions.com stays registered to Kufi, on the hosting plan Salman already paid for. The admin runs under their own address, separate from everything else we run. If they ever leave, the site, the content and the admin leave with them.