Fonemika: designing a speech therapy website for worried parents

Most parents arrive at a speech therapist's website with a quiet worry. Their child is two and still has only a handful of words. A teacher mentioned a sound that won't come. Someone at the playground said "wait and see". They are not looking for a brochure. They want to know whether they should be worried, and what to do next.

That was the brief behind the new fonemika.rs: a website for Fonemika, a speech therapy and special education centre in Voždovac, Belgrade, working with children from one to ten years old.

Same brand, much better

The old site ran on Webflow and already ranked for "logoped Voždovac". The founder's wish was simple: keep the colours, the brand and the fonts, but make it look much better.

So the plum, slate and cream stayed, and so did the Baskervville headings. The body type moved to a cleaner Instrument Sans. Soft panels in lilac, sage and butter, all drawn from the same palette, give each area of work its own colour. The logo was redrawn as a vector so it stays sharp everywhere.

Every old address was kept or redirected, so the site moved to Astro and Sanity without losing the searches that already bring families in.

Calm, not clinical

What we think matters most on a site like this is the words. A worried parent reads every sentence twice.

So we rewrote the copy sentence by sentence, trading "difficulties" for challenges, development and support. A first visit is an assessment, not an examination. Nothing on the site sounds medical, nothing diagnoses, and nothing frightens. The tone is the one the centre uses in the room: through play, at the child's own pace, together with the parents.

The photos follow the same rule: the centre's own rooms, showing exactly where a child will sit, play and work.

Two quizzes instead of a phone call

The phone is the main way to book, but a call is a big step when you're not sure there is a problem. So we added a smaller one.

Two short quizzes, one for speech therapy and one for special education, ask a parent eight questions about their child's age and everyday signs. Every question comes from signs the centre already describes on its own pages. The result is one of three plain answers, with links to the matching areas of work. It always says that it is not a diagnosis, and it carries straight into the contact form, so the first message already says what the parent noticed.

Every area of work, its own page

Late talking, articulation, stuttering, reading and writing, attention and memory, getting ready for school: each of the eighteen areas has its own page, in a Sanity studio the centre can edit. They are grouped by who does the work, speech therapist or special educator, and each ends with related articles and a way to book.

Search engines and AI assistants can read every one of those pages, and parents searching for one specific worry land on the page about exactly that.

A form that actually sends

The old form went away with Webflow. The new one sends straight to the centre's inbox. It's a small thing, until you realise how many sites quietly lose the messages they ask for.

What we take from it

A site for a children's therapy centre is not a sales page. It is the first conversation with a parent who is a little scared. Answer their question before they have to ask it, give them a small next step, and be honest about what a quiz or a website can and can't tell them.

Fonemika is live at fonemika.rs. See the Fonemika project, or start a project if your practice needs a site that speaks to people the way you do.