Let’s Play Therapy

A local counseling practice that specializes in child therapy reached out to me for help with building an online presence for what was already a humming word-of-mouth therapy business.

We crafted a professional, custom-tailored brand and web presence by building and seamlessly tying together a website, search engine and directory profiles, and social networks leading to a big increase in phone calls and appointments scheduled, improvements to online review scores, and ultimately new patients for the practice.

I met with the Let’s Play Therapy (LPT) folks immediately to learn more about their story, existing business and future goals. From what I could tell, LPT was already doing well from word-of-mouth referrals but were interested in taking things to the next level.

The business did not have a website or much public information on the web. What little information that did exist was not ranking well in search engines or professional directory websites like Psychology Today and HealthGrades. They also had no social media presence to help drive traffic or leads to a would-be website with simple ways to contact and request appointments.

After doing some research on web presences for other small therapy practices in the area, we realized that their branding, content and websites were often disorganized and the overall website experience felt "amateur". Slow, clunky, and poorly designed.

In an instant we realized that we could stand out from the crowd by optimizing for the niche of child therapy, which was already LPT’s specialty area anyway. By designing a simple but beautiful brand and website, and writing content with a strong focus on child therapy, LPT could position themselves as the most professional, trustworthy, and approachable option for child therapy in the local community.

Early on in discovery LPT indicated that they wanted the business brand to reflect their specialty in child therapy, but not come off as too childish or cheesy—striking a nice balance between professionalism, intellectualism, and child-like whimsy.

We started with a rough sketch of a family of four holding hands, which I scanned and re-rendered digitally, cleaning it up and adding a bold, vibrant color palette anchored in a deep purple that grabs your attention immediately. The "alternates" version of the Montserrat font family adds that touch of whimsy we were looking for while still remaining bold and professional.

While working on the branding, I also mapped out the website with key pages and the types of content and calls-to-action we should include for each page. LPT took a first pass at writing the content, and I helped them to refine it based on some preliminary research on search keywords and phrases we were hoping to optimize for to increase their chances of ranking high in search results.

After the content and branding were in decent shape, I took to Adobe Illustrator to quickly draw up some low-fidelity mockups and asked for detailed feedback. LPT was very happy with my initial concepts, and after a one or two short revision rounds we had high-fidelity static mockups for all key pages, with both mobile and desktop layouts.

We incorporated the fun and vibrant color palette into the website design in subtle ways to sprinkle pops of color across the pages, and combined them with organic shapes and curvy lines to make the website flow and feel a bit more interesting and fun.

LPT wanted to be able to edit most of the website content themselves, so I decided to build the website using WordPress, the most widely-used CMS tool at the time of writing. I spun up a low-cost server on DigitalOcean and provisioned it with an Ansible playbook.

The website was built with speed and user-friendliness in mind. It uses a custom WordPress theme created by yours truly, and a core set of plugins and custom theme functionality to automate caching, SEO, sitemap generation, concatenation and minification, image optimization, and more.

I also setup a contact form and integrated it with Mailgun and Google ReCAPTCHA to minimize any potential spam.

Despite having multiple images and some custom JavaScript functionality, the homepage weighs less than 500KB and loads in half a second or less on a high speed internet connection, and even faster once the page and resources have been cached for a return user.

As website development was wrapping up, I integrated Google Analytics and Search Console and began setting up business and social profiles on Google Business, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, HealthGrades, Psychology Today, and more.

To launch, all we had to do was deactivate the temporary "coming soon" page and begin allowing search engines to index the website. Easy peasy!

Over the course of a few weeks, the LPT website and Google Business info began showing up towards the top of search results for the keywords and phrases we decided to optimize for.

I checked in with LPT periodically during the first few months after launch to see how things were going, and they were happy to report back that the phone was ringing off the hook with new leads and potential clients. Success!

All in all, I had so much fun working with LPT to help them reach their potential and expand their clientele by crafting a custom-tailored online presence for their business.