True Skin & Laser Academy
Sarah Bates had built a specialist skin and laser clinic and started training other therapists inside it, but the whole academy existed as one page on the clinic’s website. Brilliant Digital gave it its own eleven-page website, designed from scratch and written in custom code.
View live website
The starting point
and the problem.
Sarah Bates spent almost twenty years teaching Business Studies, the last of them as a Head of Department. She retrained in advanced skin and laser while she was still in the classroom, opened True Skin & Laser in a garage conversion in 2022, and grew it into a clinic in its own premises turning consistent five-figure months. Then therapists started asking her to teach them.
By the time she came to us she was running seven courses, four of them Ofqual-regulated VTCT qualifications, out of an approved VTCT Skills centre. All of it lived on a single page of the clinic’s website, filed under treatments next to the things clients book rather than the things therapists train for. That page covered one course out of the seven. Everything else was a link to Thinkific.
Two things followed from that. A therapist deciding where to train could not see a route: seven courses, no order, no way to tell which one to start with or where it led. And a training academy sells the trainer far more than the syllabus. Sarah’s classroom years, the clinic she still runs, the fact that she teaches every course herself to no more than four people at a time, none of it was anywhere a prospective student would find it.
How we made
it happen.
We designed and built the website from scratch and wrote it in custom code, with no WordPress, no theme and no page builder underneath it. The first decision was structural. Seven courses became seven pages, one each, because a therapist searching for laser hair removal training is searching for exactly that, not for a page called "Pathway". Above them sits a Learning Pathways page doing the job the old page could not: three routes through the seven courses, each one costed from start to finish, so someone who does not know where to begin is told.
Sarah is the product, so the site is written in her voice. The hero introduces her in the third person, because nobody has met her yet, and from the section below it she speaks as "I". That is how she writes and how she teaches. Her own lines carry the argument: these are not courses to collect certificates, they are career pathways. She was also clear about who the academy is not for, and we left that in rather than sanding it off.
She told us three separate times, in her content questionnaire, that she wants to talk to someone before they buy. So the main call to action across the site is a free discovery call rather than an enrol button, wired to her own calendar, with direct enrolment kept as the second route. Every course page then answers the same four questions in the same place: who it is for, what it costs, how long it takes, and what you need before you start.
What we
delivered.
- 01Eleven-page website designed from scratch and written in custom code, with no WordPress, theme or page builder
- 02Seven course pages, each answering who it is for, cost, duration and entry requirements in the same place
- 03Learning Pathways page setting out three routes through the courses, each costed from start to finish
- 04Course pages marked up so search engines can read the qualification, the price and the dates
- 05Every word, photograph and page title editable through a content editor built for the site
- 06Discovery call booking wired to Sarah’s own calendar from every page on the site
- 07Menus, accordions and course steps built to work by keyboard and screen reader, not just by mouse
The academy now exists on its own terms rather than as a page on the clinic that grew it. Someone arriving with no idea where to start gets three routes, priced, in the order Sarah would put them in herself. Someone who already knows they want laser training gets a page about laser training, with the machines named and what a graduate can charge on it.
Sarah is on the website properly for the first time. Almost twenty years in a classroom, a clinic built from a garage conversion, every course taught by her in groups of no more than four with the models provided and the clinic still running around the training. That is what a therapist is actually choosing between, and it is now what the website argues.
She can also change it. The copy, the photographs and the page titles all sit in a content editor, so a new price or a new date does not need us. Everything else stays where it is: a site written from scratch, with nothing to patch and no plugins to keep up with.
You might also like
these projects.
Ready to start
something brilliant?
Every project in our portfolio started with a conversation. Tell us about yours and we'll show you what's possible.