A Web Design Case Study - A Wellness Clinic

Communicating Peace, Compassion, and Trust Through Design

Welcome to the wellness clinic case study. A Website that creates a relaxing atmosphere to communicate compassion and sincere personal interest. I enjoy creating these fictional companies and designing their websites to practice my skills. As a bonus I can share them with you to help your company website’s potential come to life.

Quick Note Before You Get Started:

The company model is all imagination, this means the website strategy does not present the same level of research and discovery that a real business deserves. The project’s purpose is to practice and present design skills.
All the names and/or places presented are fictional.
All images are free stock, available photo credits are found at the bottom of this page.
You may notice pieces of text missing from the website, some content, for example about sections or profiles, are specific to the company; this makes any content created without a company unrealistic.

View Prototype

Featured Design Objectives

A Relaxed, Peaceful Experience is Achieved Through Careful Design

The look and feel of a website is determined by the design elements and content as a whole. Is it fun and friendly? Serious and trustworthy? Corporate and professional? Not every feeling is effective for every business. While a harsh corporate look is effective in creating trust in the right scenario, it would not create a feeling of relaxation and care that a wellness clinic needs.

The ‘look’ of the website is what creates the atmosphere, in this case a relaxed one. Consider the colours chosen. The natural feel of the green and brown help create a feeling of relaxation as does the warm overall tone of the website. Green is also commonly associated with health, making it an ideal choice.

The word choice and tone of voice used to write content plays an important role in the feel of the website. Along with providing information the written content’s objective is to communicate the care and interest the clinic takes in their patients. In the about section, “Your Healthy Lifestyle...” or the services section, “What do you need,” do you notice a pattern? The use of words like, ‘you’ and ‘your’ and the tone of voice speaking to the viewer is what creates this sense of interest.

When There is No Trust, No Actions are Taken

Trust is an integral part of any company website, however in the health industry the standards are understandably high. No action will be taken by visitors on the website if they're not given sufficient reason to trust the business. A rapport must be built. This is accomplished in many ways, depending on the industry it could be technical information, testimonials, a portfolio, bios about the owners and/or service providers, expressing personal interest, or a combination of any of the above. For a wellness clinic a few main strategies come into play.

First, the simplest, most common, and often expected way to build trust was used; testimonials. The majority of websites will feature testimonials, for a good reason, people find confidence in the words of others. Notice the testimonial section though, only one quality statement was chosen. A mistake I see often is so many testimonials that it is overwhelming to viewers. In the eyes of many, however, quantity means quality. To accommodate this a link is provided to google reviews, this way viewers aren't overwhelmed but provided more statements if they are unsure.

To continue building trust, a tone of interest and personal information from the staff makes the service providers real people. Often businesses are portrayed as aloof, untouchable, viewed as a whole instead of as individual people who have the same feelings and concerns as you. Rarely is this done on purpose, thus it is something that needs to be avoided purposefully. In this case, as mentioned, the content was written in a tone of interest, but on top of that, a section (and imagine a page along with it) was included about the ‘team’. Bios would be featured that make them real people whom the visitors can connect with, just as they would in person.

Featured Design Principles

The Reasons Behind Type

The variety and intricacies of type would take too much time to discuss in detail, but here’s a peek into what was chosen and why. There are two main categories of fonts, serif and sans-serif.

For the wellness clinic a serif font was chosen for the headings and a sans serif font chosen for the body text. Why that placement and combination? Serif fonts are more expressive, giving life the text. Serif, because of its origins, is also classical in nature and viewed with an air of establishment and seniority. These sentiments are just another way to build trust.

However, sans serif is the reliably readable option of the pair. That’s why you often see the body text and likely the smaller headings displayed with this type of font, even though the large headings or logo font may be serif. This benefit outweighs its sometimes generic nature, body text has the time and quantity to express feelings through the content, while short headings, though carefully crafted, sometimes benefit from that extra bit of feeling serif adds.

Balancing Readability with Visual Interest and Feeling

Colour is a huge part of any website design. Even a monochromatic theme of black and white is chosen for a reason. Colour conveys messages, stirs emotions, and even impacts a viewer's actions.

For the wellness clinic the green and brown theme provide a tranquil feel. They're earth tones that fit the “natural health” theme of the wellness clinic. The warm tone colors create a warm website. They are gentle colours.

By using the colours correctly, the website also helps users make the decision to book or to ‘contact’ the wellness clinic. Because of the colour's gentle nature they help build trust, but they also perform another important function, the colours identify and bring attention to the buttons on the website. The green is the brighter and more eye-catching of the two, for this reason it was chosen for the buttons as well as the links. Any ‘clickable’ elements on a website are most effective when they’re easily identified, to achieve this there must be consistency throughout the website.