True-U
A private counselling practice with a site that was doing too much at once. Rebuilt calm, with one clear path for people who are having a hard day.
- Rebuilt around one clear path: read, then get in touch
- A dedicated section for the twelve guided journals
- Signposting page for anyone who needs urgent help, not a booking
- Warm and calm rather than clinical — it had to feel like the practice
The problem
The original site had everything on the front page at once — services, qualifications, journals, blog posts, contact details — and the effect was noise. Somebody arriving anxious, on a phone, at eleven at night, had to work out where to go next. That is exactly the wrong moment to ask someone to work anything out.
What I built
The rebuild does less. The home page says who Julie is, what she helps with, and gives you two things to do: get in touch, or read something first. That is all.
The twelve guided journals got their own section rather than fighting the counselling work for attention on the home page, with a page per volume so each one can be linked to and found on its own.
The design brief was the interesting part: warm, calm, credible, and emphatically not “modern tech startup”. The palette is soft, the type is generous, and nothing moves unless you ask it to. A counselling practice that looks like a SaaS product is a counselling practice nobody trusts.
There is also a signposting page — crisis lines and services — for the people who need help faster than a booking form can give it. It is not a page that will ever win business. It should be there anyway.
The result
A site that gets out of the way. The whole thing is static HTML and CSS with almost no JavaScript, so it opens instantly on a bad connection.