SmileyZone.de

Own project: an emoji encyclopedia covering 2,226 emojis, each with its own page in German and English — meaning, everyday use, code points, skin tone variants and the combinations a character actually appears in. Alongside it are tools that go beyond looking things up: an emoji downloader, a nickname generator, a chat analyser that counts a WhatsApp history entirely in the browser. Moved off WordPress onto custom PHP in 2026 without losing a single old URL — 6,013 pages are listed in the sitemap.

Starting point

There is no shortage of emoji websites, and most of them are a table to copy from. What a character actually says in a message, why a harmless hand gesture reads as an insult in another country, or which skin tones Unicode even allows for a handshake between two people — none of that is there. On top of that, Unicode grows every year: a list curated once is incomplete two years later without anyone noticing. And the site was not new — it had been running on WordPress for years with 1,715 URLs grown over time, every one of which had to survive the rebuild, or external links and search results would end up nowhere.

What we built

The rebuild runs on plain PHP without a framework. Its basis is the complete RGI set from Unicode 17.0, checked against the Unicode reference: 3,944 of 3,944 fully qualified sequences are covered, 2,226 of them with a page of their own and the remaining 2,030 as skin tone variants. Every page has its own text in both languages instead of a machine translation, and for 146 characters an editorial note on cultural meaning is added — deliberately not across the board, because an invented claim about a gesture can be badly wrong. The skin tone picker uses colour swatches rather than lists of characters and handles two-person combinations as well, and the search recognises a pasted emoji itself, not just its name. Several tools round out the reference work, among them a downloader with a ZIP collection, a nickname generator, an ASCII generator and a chat analyser that counts a history in the browser and sends only the bare list of characters to the server. All 1,715 URLs of the old WordPress installation still lead to a valid page, fonts and scripts are served from our own server, the site can be installed as an app, analytics run cookie-free through the site's own domain, and advertising only loads after explicit consent.

Result

smileyzone.de is live and lists 6,013 URLs in its sitemap: 2,226 emoji pages in two languages, plus categories, occasions, name pages and the tools. Lighthouse measures 100 out of 100 for SEO and best practices on mobile. The catalogue is verified against the Unicode reference and therefore complete, instead of stopping at a partial selection as most emoji sites do.