Door Creek Dental
www.doorcreekdental.com
Door Creek Dental is a Madison area family dental practice that stays on the cutting edge of dentistry. Our goal was to create a site that reflects their commitment to technology while establishing their family-oriented environment. Inspyre always creates sharp designs, so reinforcing the modernity of the facilities was no problem; however, to communicate the local feel of their office, we had to hit the drawing board. After browsing countless stock photos online that felt too staged, we realized that custom photography was our answer.
Custom Photography
For three days, inspyre was at the dentist. Luckily, we weren’t sitting in a chair the whole time, but instead had the opportunity to explore the office and to witness their daily procedures. We wanted to capture patients and doctors interacting to convey the friendly atmosphere, and what we found was surprising: happy patients. That’s right, people were having a good time at the dentist, and we had no trouble taking ‘candid shots’ that were actually candid. After following a few patients around, we set to work scouring the building both inside and out to capture some establishing shots. We used these throughout the website and more importantly to guide our overall site design–the color scheme of the website and the actual office are the same.
Back at our office, we began categorizing our photos in relation to the sitemap we had created with Door Creek Dental and then created custom header images for each page of the site. In addition to the headers, we agreed with Door Creek Dental that it’d be valuable to take group shots of their staff, so users of the webpage could learn more about the people they’d be interacting with. Our final trip to Door Creek Dental felt like school picture day, but we made sure everyone had fun and made it as quick and painless as possible.
Content Management System
During our initial discussions with Door Creek Dental, they expressed the desire to be able to periodically update some content on their homepage. To our ears, it sounded like they wanted a weblog! In response, we installed Wordpress, a popular open-source blogging tool and customized it to suit their needs. This meant allowing some employees of Door Creek Dental to be able to write and publish posts to the site, customizing the look and feel to match the rest of the site, and having the newest blog post show up on the homepage. We also spent some time discussing the merits of letting users comment on these posts. We all decided that allowing comments would support the community aspect of Door Creek Dental but that there should be some moderation involved. Our solution was to give Door Creek Dental the power to approve or decline comments before they are posted on the website.
For inspyre, the concept of blogging is first-hand–we eat and sleep technology–, but knowing that our clients were tackling a new frontier inspired us to write up a tutorial on how to blog with Wordpress. And what better way to share this information than a blog post?
Website
Throughout our photography shoots and setting up the blog, the website, of course, was always the main goal. In the beginning we sat down with Door Creek Dental, or DCD as we like to say it, and just talked about what information they want to be available online. With a huge pool of data in front of us, we though about how different users might navigate through the waters. The main distinction for DCD users is whether or not they’ve been there before: new visitors vs. current patients. With this delineation in mind, the rest of the site fell into place.
We encourage you to take a look at the difference our site redesign has made for Door Creek Dental. Considering we’re talking about dentistry, here’s the Before and After:
Client Feedback
I have had so many compliments on our web site. Today I spoke with a gentleman from yellowpages.com who is putting together some advertising for us and he commented on how nice and professional our site looks. Thanks for all you have done!
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