Jen was leaving a large mental health practice to start her own and needed help with a website, strategy, and branding. Her end goal was a comprehensive practice called THRPY Collective, but her instinct was to start with a small individual site for her practice. I encouraged her to do both, offering only services currently provided while building the bones for the collective and leaving room for growth.
The main objectives for the site were:
The turnaround time on this project was a month, from discovery and ideation to delivery.
After getting some background information through emails, I interviewed Jen to find out what she wanted and needed out of a website. We discussed what areas were essential to getting the site up and running, how she envisioned the expanded collective and practice, and where we could leave room for that future growth.
Jen had some sites that she liked, particularly a practice in MO with an analogous model where she’d worked in grad school. Their practice was much larger than what she had envisioned, but it served as a good model and gave me several ideas of where to leave space for future growth.
I ran an audit of several therapy sites, finding inspiration as well as places for improvement, and researched the areas of practice to inspire imagery and as a basis for future site copy.
I began on paper as I usually do, laying out the pages needed and the general flow of the site. I do this to quickly work through several ideas before touching a computer, preventing me from getting too attached to any one idea and speeding up the whole process.
My thinking in designing the user flow was to progressively:
The idea was to give users a sense of confidence in the practice as they progressed to the consultation form. CTAs to the form were placed in each section, along with links to additional information.
Once all the pages were laid out in Figma, I began iterating and refining the navigation. When I was happy with the user flow, I ran the wires by Jen and moved on to some mockups.
Jen had a color theme picked out for her business cards which I expanded upon, bringing in accent colors for emphasis and CTAs, and adjusting contrasts for accessibility.
The imagery and icons went through several iterations. The feeling we wanted to convey was of calm stability, a welcoming community with a degree of professionalism lending confidence the services provided.
I landed on Jen's office as the theme, Jen had headshots and pictures of her office done professionally, and I supplemented them with some edited stock photos.
This is part of the final mockup for the home page.
THRPY Collective needed a logo. Something clean that evoked stability.
I moved the project into my preferred design program, Webflow. Once all the classes, styles and variables were defined it was relatively smooth sailing. Some layout decisions had to be made at different breakpoints, but for the most part time spent refining the design in Figma really paid off in the end.
We made some edits on the way to publishing, putting the resources page on hold temporarily and adding a page with information on rates and reimbursement.
All roads led to the consultation form, the conversion rate of which is our main KPI, so we aimed for a welcoming yet professional tone and limited the required information to respect the privacy of our users.
I chose an airy, serene background for this section, echoing brand colors while setting it apart from other sections of the page.
Jen's motto for the collective, “where curiosity meets belonging”, served as the theme for the titles and overlines.
Working these titles out forced us to consider what this really meant, and how to convey that story to potential clients. Working this out help greatly to clarify the vision of the collective and express that to users.
Jen had a bio written for the Psychology Today website that we used for the About section.
I put together the rest of the copy for the site, editing pieces of Jen's writing on the Psychology Today page, and writing the rest based on our initial interview and subsequent conversations to detail the collective and its mission.
Based on preliminary research, I wrote the services descriptions with a little help from ChatGPT. Below each brief description is a link to a more in-depth explanation on the services page.
Jen's loyal clients who were following her to the new practice provided several glowing endorsements for the testimonials section of the site.
Jen’s internet presence at previous therapy practices has proved to be an SEO challenge. Through site-mapping, indexing, carefully chosen titles and meta descriptions, and management of Google's dashboard we’ve made incremental progress in bumping the site up in search results. This continues to be a work in progress.
Accessibility considerations for the site include:
I will continue to maintain and update the site, as well as work on the Google dashboard to improve search results.
Jen has big plans for THRPY Collective. We will be expanding the site to include art curation for therapy practices as well as paintings for sale. We will also be adding a resources page to give users additional information on therapy options, and links to the broader therapeutic community.
I learned a great deal about effective planning, communication, and time management working on this project. To conceive of, design, brand, and build the THRPY Collective site took much collaboration, and working together closely we were able to create something that exceeded both of our expectations.
My workflow also improved and evolved through this project. Finding places where components I'd built for previous projects could be modified and reused sped up my flow and allowed me to focus more on higher level concerns.
