Integrative Family Healthcare

This project began as a “redesign,” however it rapidly developed into an intense overhaul. Instead of being given a set of criteria or requirements to focus on in terms of functionality, Dr. Armine was more interested in the imagery and presentation of the site. (Functionality and content was, however, still a very close second in terms of priorities.) His original website was a part of a community/directory that offered pre-built website packages and membership in their directory listings. Unsatisfied with the appearance of his site, and wanting it to reflect his practice’s approach to integrative and alternative healthcare (along with wanting more control over his site), Dr. Armine came to me looking for a fresh presence on the web that portrayed his practice as being more than just chiropractic care.

Out With the Old

The very first step in redesigning the website was assessing their present situation. While not terrible, the original website was definitely in-need of a visual revamping. The site made almost no use of stylesheets, was laid out using tables, had very obviously been constructed using a template, and seemed to be plagued with unprofessional clip-art.

The first decision was for a fresh, clean, and unified color palette. After a few mock-ups missed the mark, I finally hit a bulls-eye  with the combination of green and white; with white being the primary color and green acting as the accent. The challenge was balancing the use of color so that the site didn’t feel sterile or cluttered.

I decided that placing a horizontal menu across the top of the page (rather than down the left hand side) would leave the rest of the page feeling more open and allow for greater flexibility in terms of content display. Likewise, even though the footer was somewhat tall, it’s contents were kept to a minimum. This helped to keep the focus on the page’s content rather than the site’s navigation. The navigation was also kept very simple and intuitive to make browsing the site as simple as possible for users who may have a harder time browsing the internet.

A few key graphic pieces were strategically placed to help tie together and enhance the design, at which point the bulk of the redesign was completed. However, there was still a hefty amount of work to be done to get the site to where it needed to be in terms of functionality.

Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V

Getting  all of the data migrated from the old site to the new one wasn’t an overly time consuming process, as the structure itself remained largely unchanged. There were a handful of static pages with different information that had to be created and tweaked stylistically for the best presentation. The difficult part became integrating all of the little pieces that made the site more user-friendly; a set of buttons for dynamically resizing the page text, the ability to apply print-only stylesheets to blog posts, an easy way to manage the different FAQs that applied to the practice. Not to mention the overwhelming task of integrating an entire forum into a WordPress installation.

Plug It In, Plug It In

I wasn’t overly blown away when I found a plugin developed for the explicit purpose of resizing text. I wasn’t even too shocked to find a plugin that applied a polished print-only stylesheet to blog posts. I was relieved to find a plugin specifically for managing a list of FAQs. However, when I found a well-developed, feature-rich, smartly-executed plugin that created a forum for a WordPress website, I almost fell off my chair. Forums (the good ones, at least) are very complex systems with quite a lot of data, users, and roles to manage. Finding one that could so seamlessly fit within a WordPress installation was a serious bit of good luck. But why a forum?

One of the features that Dr. Armine pushed as system critical was accessibility. He wanted existing clients and potential clients alike to be able to get in touch with him whatever way they were most comfortable with. If you wanted to call him – the phone number was listed. If you wanted to email him – he listed his email address along with a contact form. If you wanted him to call you – there was an option on the contact form just for that purpose. And now with the forum, which was implemented to be usable by both guests and registered users, people could post questions and receive a one-time response – or active conversations could be held with many different people participating.

The main principle was to create another simple option for people to get in touch with Dr. Armine, and build up a friendly image for the practice in the process. To that extent, all of the plugins do a phenomenal job of making the site friendly and accessible for anybody who comes across it.

Hit the Road

One of my signature characteristics when working on any project is that I will become invested to the point of obsession. Whether or not that’s a good trait depends on the person you ask. Personally, it strikes me as a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, I’m very proud of the work I do; I stand by my projects and have hands-on involvement with every little detail. I push them and myself to consistently exceed expectations. On the other hand, it’s a more than common occurrence to find myself awake at 4 in the morning, adjusting an element’s padding by 2 pixels on one side – ultimately leaving me burnt out for a solid week or two at the conclusion of a project.

Dr. Armine’s website was no exception to this work ethic. Realizing how important accessibility was to both Dr. Armine and his website visitors I challenged myself to do something I had never done before – create a mobile interface for his already existing website, and teach the website to be smart enough to know which version of itself to serve to the visitor. Not an impossible task, what with the availability of internet-enabled mobile devices and the growing demand for mobile websites; but it was completely uncharted territory for me as a designer.

And yes, before you point out the obvious, I started out by locating a plugin that would help with the bulk of the work. However, there was still a considerable amount of adjusting and customization that needed to take place within the plugin’s code. Throwing in a set of custom themed icons to match the existing set of built-in icons polished off the final presentation. After a solid 2 hours of adjusting, Integrative Family Healthcare finally had a mobile-friendly version of itself that matched it’s desktop counterpart in terms of accessibility and flexibility.

Overall, I was very happy with how the website turned out. Not only did it meet every requirement set forth from the beginning, it exceeded all of them along with surpassing the hopes and wants of Dr. Armine. I also managed to learn quite a bit in the process of getting this website set up about how WordPress works under the hood. To that extent, this project couldn’t have been any more of a success.

At-a-Glance

Hours to Completion: 70 hours over a period of 4-5 days, with a follow-up week of fine-adjustments adding on another 10 hours
Site Features: Accessible menus and pages, Blog, About page, Contact form, easily editable FAQ section, fully functional forum with user, role, and topic management, print stylesheets which include all pertinent reference information on the printout
Browser Compatibility: Completely cross-browser compatible from resolutions 1024×768 and up
Color Palette: Green and White

Visit: http://www.drjessarmine.com/