HydroHolistic

Project details

HydroHolistic is a detox clinic specialising in colonic irrigation in london run by Katherine Ung, certified colon hydrotherapist passionate about the benefits of this type of health treatment. The company previously had a website and a logo but we decided to redesign everything from scratch and just retain the chinese water ideogram in the logo.

This project is the result of long research and brainstorming as I wanted to be sure to convey the message that Katherine wanted to communicate through her website.

Since the very beginning I wanted to clarify which goals Katherine wanted to achieve with her new website and after some brainstorming we ended up with the following list of goals in order of priority:

1. Generate business, get new clients
2. Convince people to book courses of three or six treatments
3. Publicise all treatments, programs and services in a simple, clear, effective way
4. Build an online reputation (through the use of testimonials, a blog and twitter)
5. Improve SEO

We agreed then, that the design would focus on the first three goals, especially the first two, while still giving some importance to the number 4.

The process of translating this research into a website has been really fun and interesting but required a lot of effort and seeking for inspiration.
I kept the most important bits in the very first part of the homepage and tried to keep it as simple as possible while still trying to capture the attention of the user by warning him loudly of a likely possible accumulation of faecal waste in his bowel - funny but quite unusual compared to the websites of other competitors in this field, that are usually more neutral and formal (in english: boring).

Since the beginning of the research phase, Katherine said she didn't want a cold looking website like many of her competitors. She wanted something professional but friendly, fun, warm and easy to read - and this is exactly what I've been always keeping in mind while working on this project, not only in the design phase but also in the final phase when I had to work closely with Katherine to rewrite the texts of the old website, which weren't optimised to be easy to read and for this reason didn't meet one of the key requirements.

The website has been optimised for search engines and I will be helping Katherine in using her blog to write useful articles that will attract traffic from search engines and social networks.

Although the images composing the design have a relevant weight in KB, the website loads quickly due to a performance optimisation work that has been accomplished by following strictly many steps:

• use of css sprites to reduce http requests
• base64 encode images in the css to reduce http requests 
• group and compress javascript files to reduce http requests and download time
• load javascript at the bottom of the HTML code
• activate gzip compression
• configure e-tags and expires headers
• use wordpress caching
• use a separate domain to load images and static files

Like every project I work on, I've ensured the website is accessible on all devices (text browsers, mobile devices, screen readers) and works well with javascript and images disabled.

Softwares and Libraries used: