How It Heals — Custom Web Design Case Study

The Brief

How It Heals is run by Keriann Zipperer, a clinical nutritionist with seven years of experience in functional and integrative medicine. She works with clients who have already been everywhere — GPs, specialists, naturopaths — and are still living with chronic fatigue, hormone issues, gut dysfunction, mould illness, and unexplained symptoms that conventional medicine couldn't piece together.

The old site lived on Wix. It worked, but it didn't tell that story. Stock imagery, generic stat callouts, a template hero, and a tone that read more like a wellness directory than a serious clinical practice. Keriann came to us because the visual brand wasn't pulling its weight — clients were impressed when they got into a consultation, but the site wasn't doing enough to get them there in the first place.

The brief wasn't "improve our SEO scores." It was: build us a site that feels like the clinic actually does. Considered. Cinematic. Honest about how hard chronic illness is. And confident enough to charge for the work.

Our Approach

This was a custom design project end-to-end. No template, no theme, no off-the-shelf block library. We started with a discovery process focused entirely on Keriann — how she talks about her work, who her ideal clients are, the moments that bring people through her door, and the words those clients use when they describe what's wrong.

From there we built the brand direction: a dark, editorial palette anchored in deep espresso browns and a single warm orange accent. Wide-format photography, large serif display type for emotional moments, restrained sans-serif for clinical credibility. The result is a site that feels closer to a long-form health publication than a service page — which is exactly what Keriann's audience responds to.

"Your bloods are normal. So why do you feel exhausted?" — New hero copy, written for the rebuild

Liaising with the Client

Custom design only works if the client is part of the room. We ran weekly review cycles with Keriann — moodboards, type explorations, hero concepts, copy drafts — iterating until each section felt like hers and not ours. Nothing went live without her say-so. When she pushed back on a colour, a word, or a layout, we changed it. That iteration is the work.

Some of the best decisions on the build came directly from her: dropping the "stat counter" trope in favour of a single client story, leading with an interactive 5-minute symptom quiz instead of a generic contact form, and rewriting the entire homepage around the question her clients actually ask themselves at 2am — not the keywords a generic SEO playbook would have prescribed.

Wix Migration

The original site was built on Wix, which made it slow, hard to extend, and locked Keriann into a platform that wasn't built for the level of customisation she needed. We migrated the entire site to a modern static-first stack hosted on Vercel — preserving every existing URL with redirects so seven years of search equity stayed intact.

That migration also unlocked the speed and editorial control we needed for the new design. Custom typography, full-bleed hero photography, smooth scroll-driven sections, and a quiz that actually works on mobile — none of which Wix could deliver cleanly.

What We Built

Bespoke brand system — colour palette, type pairing, photography direction, and a custom "HIH" wordmark designed from scratch
Cinematic hero section with editorial display type and a dual CTA (Clarity Call + interactive quiz)
Full content rewrite across every page, in Keriann's voice, validated against real client language
Six core page architecture — The Work, The Booking, The Process, The Library, About, Contact — designed as a journey rather than a brochure
5-minute symptom quiz that segments visitors into the most relevant entry point (gut, hormones, fatigue, mould)
Wix → Vercel migration with full URL preservation, schema markup, and zero-downtime cutover
Speed and AI-search foundations baked in — fast Core Web Vitals, structured data, and AI-crawler access — without making them the headline of the brand

The Result

The new How It Heals site looks and feels nothing like the old one — and nothing like the rest of the functional medicine category in Australia. It's a site that earns the consultation fee before the first call. It signals depth, care, and clinical seriousness in a category that's mostly stock photos and pastel gradients.

More importantly, Keriann is happy. The brand finally sounds like her. That's the metric that mattered most for this project — not a Lighthouse score, not a keyword ranking, but a client who can send their site to anyone in their world and feel proud of what shows up.