Bodhi Tree, a mental health counseling group founded by Julie Taft (LMHC), has two branches in New York, where they offer tele-health and in-person counseling sessions led by their talented team of full-time clinicians. Originally, Bodhi Tree contacted me in 2020 to build a site for their newly-founded Mental Health Counseling group.

While Bodhi Tree was connecting with their community on the ground, and had already established an online presence through social media, they were in need of a central online presence where they could direct their community for more information about their clinicians and their services.

Since those early days, the site has been redesigned to encompass their quickly-growing team, as well as to include more robust information about their growing roster of individual and group therapy offerings. They have plans for further expansion in the coming months.

They're growing fast, and it's been an honor to support that growth by redesigning their website to scale alongside the growing scope of their business.

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While the original website was coded from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it quickly became apparent over the course of multiple iterations that more efficient tools were needed, so that changes could be made quickly across the site, and elements updated as efficiently as possible.

Our approach to the project was to migrate the content and redesign the website in Webflow, with a focus on user experience and SEO.

This involved:

• Conducting extensive user research to understand the needs and pain points of the target audience
• Conducting extensive keyword research to better align the site's content with real=world searches conducted by users around the globe
• Creating wireframes and mockups to test different design concepts and ensure the website is easy to navigate and friction-free
• Using a mobile-first design approach to optimize the website for mobile devices, which existing metric data had shown accounts for more than half of the total visits to the site
• Implementing fast-loading and responsive website technology to improve the website's performance
• Integrating user-friendly and effective call-to-action elements to better address the needs of different users, and address responsiveness issues present in the previous iteration of the site

User journeys were developed based on thoughtful consideration of the individuals already accessing the site, and using their feedback and industry best practices to make better-informed design decisions. Wireframes and sitemaps were created to ensure a final result that worked to achieve this end.

The visual design of the site was an expansion on the already existing user interface, incorporating elements present in the site in order to create a clean, modern look that doesn't get in the way of the content presented in the pages. Inspiration for the color palette aims for a calm, soothing feeling, and draws from nature, specifically The Bodhi Tree and her uniquely heart-shaped leaves. Visual elements were updated to be consistent across sections and pages, and new elements were incorporated where the content dictated a need.

Once the design prototypes were completed and animations were mapped out, development began on a clean slate, rewriting custom code where necessary. No CMS or eCommerce solutions were needed, requiring no bespoke back end to the site, though plans for a blog will likely require these solutions in the future.

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While it included all the necessary information, the previous flow of the user interface wasn't optimized for the range of users who would be seeking counseling services. The latest redesign of the site addresses that issue, simplifying the overall user experience of the website, incorporating a harmonious interface and clear, well-defined paths to obtain information quickly in order to empower  patients to make the best decision for them.

To see the project in action, connect with Bodhi Tree! 

• Bodhi Tree MHC website
• Bodhi Tree MHC on Instagram