Alice Boetsch Child & Youth Therapist Branding & Website - Case Study

I met Alice walking our dogs. We got along right away and had a lot in common. We’re both American, married to German men, moms, relatively new dog owners and have both lived in Munich for 20+ years.

I was still toying with the idea of launching a web design businesses and I knew I wanted to work with women, probably expats starting or running their own small businesses or practices. It dawned on me that Alice was my ideal client! She needed a website and a logo and I asked her if she wanted to be a test case. She agreed!

Alice needed a few things:

• A logo

• A website in English and German

• All of the German legalese required for health and psychology practioners

A lot of our initial discussion was me talking Alice out of going with a non-hosted solution. She had an ISP and they offered WordPress hosting packages, she thought this might be something worth exploring? I explained to her that when you host your own website YOU are responsible for making changes whenever some big, out of our control thing happens on the internet.

For instance a Google changes search algorithm change. This may require making several rather technical changes to your website, changes that are difficult, tech-y and frustrating. If you have a hosted solution (like Squarespace or even Wordpress.com; the hosted solution from Wordpress) you don’t have to worry about it. The platform company usually sends out a ‘heads-up' email, letting you know what changes have come down the pike and notifies you that they have already taken care of the technical details, there is nothing you need to do. This is an enormous relief.

My clients are therapists, yoga and Ayurveda practitioners, academics and lawyers. They are not technologists and don’t need to spend hours they don’t have trying to solve technical problems. Once Alice understood this, we were off to the races.

Since she needed a bi-lingual website I thought a hosted Wordpress solution would be right for her. I had just built Wahlmünchen my blog about Munich on it and liked the experience. I also did a little research and found that there were several language plug-ins we could use.

But first, the logo. 

After a few rounds we settled on the image of a Cairn. A cairn is a stack of stones that serves as markers on a path. This seemed an apt metaphor for a therapist. Additionally we both live and work right on the Isar river. The riverbank has lots of stones and a stone seemed emblematic of our city.

You might note on my web design services page I don’t offer logos. That is correct. Logos take a LOT of work and time but look like they don’t. I highly recommend getting a personalised logo, but I’ve found that most people are not willing to accept the cost and time that having a well designed, professional logo takes. We spent at least two to three months developing Alice’s logo.

Once we finished the logo, I came up with a brand guide for Alice. I selected fonts, colors and imagery that we would use to complement her logo and communicate her brand. Now it was on to the website.

Alice was a good client. She had all of her text ready and knew what she wanted in terms of a basic site structure. She also knew what she legally had to have on the site as a psychologist. I needed her guidance here since I don’t work in that industry.

I had a few rude awakenings working with Wordpress. Even though it was free to set up the site, there were many hidden costs to use the most basic of features. I sheepishly told Alice she should probably upgrade to a business account, which made it, price wise, about the same cost as Wordpress. I then found out that any plug-ins or themes we wanted to use also costed money, so there were more costs. None of them were insanely pricey, but they did add up.

Once I built out the site, I also became really frustrated with the quality of the language switching plug-ins. They didn’t work well and unanticipated impacts on other parts of the website design. I ended up scrapping all of them and coming up with a hack where I built a set of pages in English, a set in German and used the main navigation as a language switcher. It took a long time and a lot of frustration getting to this solution, but ultimately it worked.

I also felt there was a lot less control with customising basic elements like colors, fonts, spacing, etc. without doing a lot of coding which I wanted to avoid. The more custom code you start adding the more difficult it can be for the client to make changes later on her own.

Despite all of this frustration, Alice and I were both really happy with the final result. We used the brand guidelines I select imagery that communicated the feeling and style she wanted to convey about her business. The site looked extremely professional and we were able to incorporate all of the necessary legal text in a discreet footer navigation. The site was also responsive, so it worked really well not just on desktops and laptops but also on phones and tablets.

If I had to do it all over again, I would probably build this website on Squarespace, the cost would be the same (or cheaper) and I would have avoided the headaches with plug-ins and come up with the same basic solution anyway. However we made it work, and it’s working well. You can see the live website here.