How this one started

Megan Roy sent Samantha my way in the spring.

Megan had already done the heavy lifting on the brand. Logo suite, palette, type, a guide, a couple of print layouts, the photoshoot, and a real point of view about the physical space. It’s lovely work, and when Samantha and I first talked, all of it lived in PDFs.

Fynbos was opening one floor above Boston IVF’s Maine center. Samantha founded it after going through IVF herself while she was finishing her clinical training, which tells you most of what you need to know about why the place exists. She had the lease, the brand, and nothing at all to send people to.

So there was no old site to redesign, no existing copy to argue with, and no analytics to learn from. Every word a visitor would eventually read, and every button they’d click, started as a blank document in May.

The other thing I knew going in was that Samantha’s time belongs to her clients. She wasn’t going to become a part-time webmaster, and she shouldn’t have to. Whatever I built needed to be something she could keep running without calling me, especially as practitioners joined the collective.

How I worked it

Copy, design, build, QA, then handoff and training. It’s the only thing I’ve found that reliably keeps a four month project from turning into an eight month conversation.

Copy came first

It always does. Design gets much easier once you know how much there is to say and what each piece is doing.

Fynbos was a delicate one to write. The people landing on this site are somewhere in fertility treatment, or pregnancy loss, or a pregnancy that’s frightening them, or the identity earthquake of early parenting. They’re tired and they’ve already read everything. Most of what’s out there for them is either clinical enough to be cold or soft enough to be useless.

The homepage opens on one line.

“You’re not alone in this.”

My favorite piece is a section called “This is your place if.” It’s a list, which is about as plain as a device gets, and it works because each line is specific enough that somebody reads it and goes oh, that’s me. “Not feeling like yourself.” “Quietly wondering if the way you’re feeling is okay.” “Carrying the weight of pregnancy loss.” “A partner or non-birthing parent who feels unsure where you fit.”

Then design, working from Megan’s identity

Megan handed over a finished brand, and my job was to protect it while making it behave in a browser. Type that sings at print sizes needs rebalancing at 16px on a phone. Color pairings that look great on paper still have to clear contrast standards on screen. Photography shot for a print layout needs new crops for a full-bleed hero and again for a square practitioner card.

I kept changes to Megan’s original concepts to a minimum. What I designed on top of that identity:

• A homepage that reads as a slow scroll instead of a sales funnel
• An About page carrying the mission and the five guiding values
• A Services page covering therapy, integrative bodywork and group offerings
• A For Practitioners page written for an entirely different reader
• Meet the Practitioners, a custom directory
• Contact and FAQ
• An events calendar, built and hidden, ready to turn on

The interesting design problem here was two audiences in one site. Someone arriving at the homepage in the middle of an IVF cycle and a bodyworker arriving at For Practitioners looking for a room are in completely different headspaces.

The build

Squarespace 7.1 on Fluid Engine, on Samantha’s own account. She owns the platform, the domain and the content. Nothing about this site requires me to stay in the picture.

Meet the Practitioners runs on a blog collection with a custom post template. Every practitioner is a post, so the directory sorts, filters by category and grows without anybody touching a layout. When someone new joins, Samantha duplicates an existing post and swaps the content. The template keeps the formatting consistent for her.

Collectives gain and lose practitioners constantly, and if that page had been a hand-built grid, every new hire would’ve turned into a support ticket with my name on it.

The For Practitioners form supports a revenue line, since Fynbos rents space to aligned practitioners. I built a custom inquiry form so that interest shows up structured and qualified instead of as a three-word email.

The events calendar Fynbos will run workshops and group sessions once the practitioner roster fills out, and the page can go live the day Samantha wants it. When it does, the SEO play is local intent, people around Portland browsing what’s happening.

Handoff and training

We did an hour together, live. Logging in, the Pages panel, editing a page, adding a practitioner, using categories, managing events, and how to move the events page into the main navigation when she’s ready for it.

I also wrote her a handbook. A plain Word document, written for someone who doesn’t think in web terms, covering every task she’d realistically do herself with the steps spelled out.

She published a practitioner post on her own a couple of weeks later and didn’t need to ask me a thing. That’s what the whole phase is for.

Credits

Brand identity, creative direction, photography and space design: Megan Roy Copywriting, web design, development, QA and owner training: Storey Creative