In the summer of 2020 with the majority of businesses closed or running on limited capacity due to COVID, the online presence of companies became so much more important.
Family Pet Hospital is my parent’s veterinary business founded in 2012. Since my father is a veterinarian he wanted to run his own practice to allow him to connect better with his clients. One way we were able to connect with clients was via our website. Our website pre-COVID was purely informational and had some limited contact forms and dynamic items. It was also (in my opinion at least) not user friendly for the contact forms we DID have.
For example, the appointment request form for new clients and existing clients were right next to each other with limited/small differentiation as to which form was for what reason. This often created confusion as new clients would fill in the existing clients form and existing clients would fill in the new client form.
Additionally, the website was slow and built around either depreciated WordPress plugins or an unsecure version of WordPress (if I updated WordPress past a certain version or even enabled a newer PHP version the website would cease to function!). This was a huge security problem as most vulnerabilities were public for those old plugins.
I rebuilt the site around speed, ease of use, and simplicity as the most common thing for people to check on our site are: appointment requests, contact info, address, and hours of operation.
I designed the appointment request form in a way where a client would not have to think too hard about where they need to enter their info in. They just go through the form and answer some questions which hold their hand and it allows clients to always be on the right form.
Without going too in-depth with the website changes the most important one was this form. Ever since summer 2020 when the website went live the forms have always come through with the correct information. Furthermore, this has allowed clients to be safer during the pandemic as it limits the time they are in the pet hospital for registering new pets, scheduling appointments, and requesting medication refills.