Exclusive Smile Dental Clinic is a reputable dental clinic that offers high-end dental services. They needed a new website to match their reputation, improve their SERP ranking, and back their rapidly growing online presence. They also wanted people to book appointments with a hassle-free experience from their website.

Brief and our understanding of the client's need

- Better SEO
- A new look to reflect their new status
- More appointment bookings
- Communicate their services better

Our choice of technologies to achieve this
- NextJS
- Sanity
- Airtable for managing appointments?

Metric: % increase in appointment bookings

Project goals

We set out to build Exclusive Smile Clinic a new website by prioritizing these features alongside other things we consider indispensable for a great website experience:

• Fast page loads.
• A solid information architecture (website navigation structure) that allows visitors to easily and quickly find the information they need.
• Beautiful/aesthetically pleasing look/User Interface.

Experience Design

We designed information architecture that allowed for seamless navigation and findability since there was a lot of content about the clinic and its services to feature on the website. Afterward, we built out a prototype of most of the pages that would feature on the website in our favourite (for the time) design tool - Figma.

The prototype was reviewed in a collaborative effort involving the client, TSC’s developers, and designers. We were able to get feedback and corrections from the client during this time and implemented those on the prototype.

Website Technology

We chose NextJS as the framework of choice for this project. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Development speed: NextJS has a lot of baked-in patterns that ease the amount of work a developer needs to do to build a solid website based on React. It also has an amazing ecosystem of tools, libraries etc. that greatly reduce development time for teams.
2. Best practices by default: NextJS follows a lot of best practices for making performant and fast websites which include - Route-based code splitting, Image lazy-loading with placeholders, link prefetching, code minification, and bundling.
3. Seamless deployment: NextJS can be deployed seamlessly on modern frontend platforms like Vercel (theirs), Netlify, Render, etc. This allows us to instantly make changes to our code and put them live in minutes.
4. Great ecosystem: We’ve said this before😛 but it deserves a point of its own. There are a lot of tools, libraries, and integrations built around NextJS that make it hassle-free to extend NextJS beyond what it originally ships with.

Content Management System

Having a way to manage the content on a website is now scarcely optional when getting website redesign/development requests. We prioritize this when building websites for clients and have explored a lot of options over the years in previous projects. We’ve largely settled for Sanity (sanity.io) for a lot of reasons which we’ll highlight below.

1. Ease of use: Sanity is so simple to use for content creation and management.
2. Extensibility: Wanna bring your sales charts into your CMS interface? No problem. Wanna see traffic data visualizations in the CMS? No problem. Wanna be able to preview links to your website content to see how they’d look when you share them on social platforms? No problem. Sanity is greatly customizable to fit most content authoring requirements and extensions.
3. A great community: Behind every great product is an amazing community and Sanity’s community is top-notch.
4. Developer experience: Our developers have found it super-easy to set up a Sanity-based CMS in a very short time (a few days).

At TSC Design Studio, we absolutely love❤ Sanity. Sanity allows our clients to focus on managing their content rather than fighting with the CMS interface and allows us to ship a great CMS fast for our clients.

Conclusion

Since the completion of this project, our clients have experienced over 25% increase in appointment bookings and their SERP ranking has gone up a whole lot in the first two months after launch.

Here’s what their page speed insight score looks like:

Not bad eh? (Definitely could be improved even further)

Overall, at TSC, we aim to always provide tangible value for our clients from the projects we undertake.