flarestamina.com — all-new landing page, built end to end

flarestamina.com has a real face now. Until today the domain pointed straight at the test hub — functional, but it never told anyone what Pangea8 is. Today I shipped a full landing page and moved the hub to its own address (flarestamina.com/ielts-hub). The Start practicing button drops you straight into the tests. The origin story is funny: I saw one of those viral "can you believe Claude did this" reels on Instagram and decided pangea8 deserved the same energy. The design went through three full iterations in one session with Claude. Version one was a cinematic renaissance museum — gold frames, Vermeer paintings, a rotating wax seal. Beautiful, but too luxury for an IELTS platform. Version two swung the other way: cream-and-coral minimalism. Clean, but boring and not our colors. Version three landed it: dark hi-tech in pangea8's own emerald, Linear/Vercel energy. The hero is the heart of it. Aurora glow blobs drift behind an animated grid, the headline "Band 7.5 & beyond" decodes with a matrix-style scramble, and the centerpiece is a glass mock of the actual hub — browser chrome, search bar, filter pills, and a 3-column grid of real test cards (Mock Listening 76, CDI Reading 4...). And the mock is alive. The search bar types by itself — "listening", then "reading" — the filter pills switch on their own, and the test cards dim and highlight to match, like someone is using the product right in front of you. A green tracer light runs around the card border, and on desktop the whole thing tilts in 3D as your cursor moves. Then there's the ambient layer, my favorite part. Meteors streak across the hero every twenty-something seconds — and if you tap anywhere on the hero, a meteor fires from exactly where you touched. There are 38 twinkling stars, random grid cells that pulse green, and embers rising through the final CTA. Light mode gets its own character instead of just recoloring: the stars become soft green sparkles, meteors turn into deep-green comets, and floating ring-and-plus shapes drift around that only exist in light mode. The theme system does both: it follows your device setting automatically, and a moon/sun toggle in the nav lets you override it — your choice is remembered, with zero flash on page load. Sign-in is live too. Google auth through Firebase, and once you're signed in, Start practicing jumps you to the hub instantly — same tab, preconnected, prefetched. If the sign-in popup fails or you close it, you still go straight to the tests. Practice is never blocked. I also deferred the Firebase SDK so the page paints and animates instantly even on slow connections — the SDK loads in the background and attaches auth when it's ready. Under the hood it's one 58KB HTML file. No frameworks, no build step — vanilla CSS and JS, Google Fonts, and Firebase over CDN. Spotlight hover cards, magnetic buttons, count-up stats, an animated band-score gauge, a scroll progress bar, a real favicon set (Google Search needs actual files, not data URIs), and a proper OG image for link previews. The last piece was the domain migration. flarestamina.com moved from the hub repo to the landing repo — before flipping it I checked every one of the 92 test links to make sure nothing would break (they all point to their own github.io pages, so nothing did). The hub now lives at flarestamina.com/ielts-hub and the brand finally lives at flarestamina.com. Next up: pushing past 100 tests. The landing already says 100+ — now I have to catch up to my own marketing.