Why I Created the One-Week Website Design Process for Holistic Health Pros
Most website projects drag on forever, drain your energy, and stall your momentum. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my signature One-Week Website Design process and explaining why it works so well for health and wellness practitioners who need clarity, speed, and strategy—not months of back-and-forth. I walk through every phase of the process, from pre-work to prep day, mockup, buildout, launch, and post-launch support, and shares how this streamlined approach creates websites that reflect your practice, support SEO, and free you up to focus on serving your patients.
Key Takeaways
Traditional website timelines drain momentum and make it harder for practitioners to launch confidently.
A one-week model works because the prep is done in advance, giving the designer everything needed to design strategically and efficiently.
Prep Day ensures colors, fonts, images, and SEO foundations are ready before any pages are built.
The homepage mockup allows clients to see the full vision early, making feedback easier and faster.
Building the entire site within days keeps the project focused, cohesive, and client-friendly.
Post-launch support and analytics help practitioners understand results and make data-driven updates.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
Why Most Website Projects Take Too Long
[00:00:38] Most website projects drag on for months and you're never quite sure when things are gonna be done, if they're going to be done the right way, and when you can actually launch. This is the way that I was taught to design websites, but after doing it for multiple years, I knew that there had to be a better way. Today, I wanna share the story behind my One-Week Website Design process: why I created it, what it includes, and why it works so well for health and wellness practitioners.
[00:01:11] The problem with traditional website design is that it has a pretty long timeline. Websites can take anywhere from three to six months to build, and that includes endless back and forth of revisions, which is time consuming, and it's a drain on energy. That means that practitioners are stuck waiting for designers to get back to them or to make the edits that they've requested, and sometimes they don't even get done. As a result, you are frustrated, you have lost the momentum that you had when you started your project, and your website isn't ready to launch when you want it to be out in the world.
[00:01:57] When I started my website design journey, I followed a three month design process, and while it did help me design websites, it didn't actually work for me or for my clients. I was working with multiple people at a time because I was trying to fill my spots with enough clients. I would have really long delays in when people would get feedback back to me, even though I could get edits done really quickly.
[00:02:32] As I started to work with more businesses who were professionals and wanted to spend their time serving their patients and clients instead of micromanaging every detail of a website design, I found that six months and even three months was too long for them to wait to have their website ready to launch.
How My One-Week Website Design Process Works for Healthcare Practices
[00:02:58] Practitioners needed something that was fast, the process was clear, and it gave them a strategic design, which is why I created a one week model that includes streamlined preparation, a focused Design Week, support afterwards so that my clients could get clarity and results, and I was able to give my full attention to their projects while I was working on it.
[00:03:25] What does this process actually look like? I wanted this to be as easy as possible on my clients, which is why I included so many pieces that most website designers don't.
[00:03:43] When somebody decides that they want to work with me for a custom website design, the first thing that we do is talk through their goals, what platform they want to be on, and whether they have an existing website or not. And from there I can get them scheduled on my calendar for a week where I know that I have the time to focus just on their project and where they can be available to give me feedback through email, and that they have enough time to get the pre-work done that is going to really help me to do everything that I need to do.
Pre-Work: Streamlined Prep with resources
[00:04:18] The first phase of that project actually happens before the Design Week, and that's the pre-work. My clients fill out a questionnaire about their website, their business, and their brand. They submit their copy and their images, and we talk through what the actual plan of the website is going to look like.
[00:04:41] I have all of that ahead of time so that I can go in before the Design Week starts and make sure that I know everything that I need to about their businesses. I can give them feedback on their copy or the images that they have shared, and I can make sure that once I start designing, all I need from them is feedback along the way of what they're seeing and not resources that they're having to go out and gather.
Day 1: Strategy, Branding, and SEO Foundation
[00:05:06] Then when their Design Week starts, I have what I call a Prep Day. This is the day where I am looking through all of the content that my clients have submitted to me and creating a mood board that's going to represent what their website will look and feel like. I'm making sure that their color palette is accessible and has enough variety for the design. I'm helping them to choose fonts if they don't already have them.
[00:05:37] I'm also making sure that we have enough stock images for their site, even building a stock image library, and then optimizing all of those images with keywords in the file names and making sure that they're going to load really quickly on the site. I also do some keyword research if they haven't come to me with it, so that we can think about SEO as part of the foundation of a website instead of putting that off until the end.
Day 2: Homepage Mockup
[00:06:07] Then on day two, I get into building the mockup. I take your copy, your images, your branding information, and I design the layout of the homepage of your website. You're not having to guess what it's gonna look like with filler copy and images. It's actually all of your stuff put into the layout that we're gonna use for the homepage of your site. This allows my clients to take a look at what I've created and let me know if it feels like they expected or if there are any design elements that we need to change.
[00:06:44] Most of the feedback I get in this phase are little things like changing the color of a button or featuring one color less than the others or potentially changing out copy and images once they see it all in place. I find it really helpful to act like this is the actual homepage that's going to go live because you're not having to guess at what it's going to look like. This is going to be recreated when we get into your website platform, and so it makes it really easy for my clients to get a good feel of what the entire design will look like.
Days 3-4: Full Website Developmet
[00:07:20] Then on day three and four, I take their feedback and that mockup and I build out the entire website. This is my head down couple of days where I am building out up to eight pages of your site with all of the copy, all of the images, and making sure that it is optimized, user-friendly, and includes everything that you need.
Day 5: Final Optimization and Launch prep
[00:07:44] Then on day five, once the full site is built and my clients have had a chance to give feedback on things we might wanna change, I'm going in and making sure that everything works the way that it's supposed to and is optimized for SEO.
[00:07:58] I'm doing things like testing all of the links on the site to make sure that they work. I'm adding SEO titles and descriptions to every page on the site. I'm adding alt text to all of the images. I'm making sure that we're connected to Google Analytics and Search Console so that we can have all of those pieces in place and ready to go. Then I will help my clients to connect their domain, if it's not already, and we can launch the website at the end of that week.
[00:08:25] I have some clients who go through the Design Week and at the end they want to sit on things a little bit. They might have a couple changes they need to make on the backend, and then we plan to launch the site in a week or two so that they have time to start promoting and sharing.
[00:08:43] I make sure that the domain is connected and once the website is live, I can go through and make sure that search console is actually picking up the site. I can make sure that the SEO work that we've done hits all of the points that it needs to through another SEO audit, and my clients are able to launch with an entirely custom design very, very quickly.
Post-Launch Support + Analytics Tracking
[00:09:08] Then afterwards, they get 30 days of support where they can ask questions or request edits to the site. They get six months of analytics tracking, where we're taking a look at how much traffic is coming to the site, which keywords are bringing people to the site, and what we might want to tweak to make sure that we are getting the results that we want, and they also get custom tutorial videos so that they can do edits themselves.
[00:09:34] It's so important to me that my clients are able to take over their websites at the end and update their copy or change out an image if they want to. They can hand that off to their team, they can do it themselves, or they can come back to me for those things. But I never want somebody to feel like they are dependent on me to make the small changes on their site.
Why a One-Week Process Works for Wellness Practitioners
[00:09:55] The reason that this one week design process works so well, specifically for health and wellness professionals, is because you don't have time for a three to six month build. Your practice is out there serving people, and you need it to be bringing traffic and clients to you instead of waiting for months to have it out there in the world. You also need clarity and strategy without being overwhelmed by tons of questions and having to give feedback every step of the way. My process is designed so that I am taking as much off of your plate as I possibly can while still giving you a site that reflects your voice and your values and the clients that you serve.
[00:10:42] You also want a site that is client friendly and built for SEO. That is one piece that I do that a lot of other designers don't. I think of SEO from the very beginning so that it's built into the foundation of your site.
[00:10:58] Same thing with accessibility. Everything that I do in my design is with accessibility in mind. We are making sure that our color palettes meet those standards. We are thinking about sizing and the types of fonts that we're using so that everything is built with a really strong foundation and all you are then having to do is market your business and let the website do those final sales pieces.
[00:11:27] A fast turnaround means that my clients get momentum, they are confident, and they love that they have a site that works the right way for them and reflects their practice so that when people come in to actually see them in person, it feels like an extension of what they've already seen online.
How to Book Your One-Week Website Design
[00:11:48] I created this One-Week Design process because you deserve a site that feels like you and brings in clients without spending months waiting for it to come together. If you're ready for a website that's strategic, SEO friendly and done in just one week, let's talk. You can book a call with me on my website or DM me on Instagram @lemonandthesea so that we can talk about your goals for your website and how a custom One-Week Website can help you to accomplish them.
[00:12:20] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes. I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
