Laurie Belanger

Laurie Belanger is a Clinical Social Worker and Trauma Therapist with more than 20 years of experience helping adults and children in various clinical settings.

When Laurie came to me, she was in the midst of preparing to pivot her business away from in-person clinical therapy and more toward therapy consultation, training, and speaking opportunities. To make the pivot effective, she needed a fresh, new design for her website.

As we talked, it became clear that Laurie needed help from one of my partners to make the pivot a success and do justice to her expertise. Laurie selected elements from my Web Design Your Way package and worked with Casi Hall to create a new brand, including a logo, a mark, a color palette, and a font palette. Casi also did a photo shoot with Laurie so that she’d have a variety of headshots and lifestyle shots to use on her website and other marketing collateral.

The cool part: Whenever I work with one (or more!) of my partners, the four of us make donations in support of women-focused nonprofits. Our donation for Laurie’s project went to the WNY Women’s Foundation! In short, I got to work with a talented woman to help a talented woman. It doesn’t get better than that.

What a pleasure it was to give Laurie the web presence she deserves!

Kind words

“Kristen did an amazing job reimagining my website. The feedback from my professional community has been overwhelmingly positive. The professional, yet fun and very "me" site is just what I needed to help me move intentionally into larger and more visible projects going forward. I now feel that I have a website that I can be proud to direct new business to. Kristen was understanding and comfortable to work with. She walked me through every step and I never felt uncomfortable asking questions. If you are looking for someone who will really take the time to get to know you and your business well so that your site truly speaks to what you can uniquely offer, Kristen is a great choice.”

Laurie Belanger

The original website

Laurie had designed her original website on WordPress.com. But she had always found WordPress difficult to use—and as a result, her existing website often went without updates. Worst of all, the design had the “boxes within boxes” look that so many older sites suffer from, making her site seem outdated.

The existing website also felt uneven in terms of the information it presented and how it helped visitors move through the site. Some pages had very little text and no calls-to-action. But other pages had enormous amounts of text and calls-to-action that were difficult to make out because they were text links and not colorful buttons.

To give you an idea of where we started, here’s a look at Laurie’s original home page:

The web design process

Laurie provides consultations to other clinical therapists; training for therapists and families; and keynote addresses for organizations. Her website needed to simultaneously speak to three very different audiences and look good doing it.

While Casi was working on Laurie’s brand and photos, I was working to streamline the wording on Laurie’s existing website. I created a sitemap that would group Laurie’s offerings into “big buckets” designed to help visitors self-filter based on what they wanted to accomplish. Luckily, Laurie already had plenty of content on her existing website; it just needed to be tweaked to fit her sitemap and optimized for search engines.

Then, it was on to Squarespace so I could start building her new site.

I kept Laurie’s design simple and used her vibrant color palette, her quirky logo mark, and some gentle scroll-based animations to inject some personality into the site. I sprinkled some drop shadows throughout to add depth and some colorful shapes to keep the site lighthearted and interesting. I also made sure Laurie had saved sections ready to go so she could easily announce upcoming workshops and speaking engagements. Finally, I brought all of her blog posts over to her new site and made sure they were categorized and tagged for easy filtering and searchability.

I couldn’t wait to bring it all together on Squarespace’s drag-and-drop, no-code builder. Laurie has already been able to make some updates on her own—and has nary a grey hair to show for it.

Take a look at her new website home page!