Concept work: Ouzel Dental.
Brand, mockup and site.

Built as a WordPress block theme from the mockup, with booking as a plugin of its own: the free times worked out from the opening hours, each time bookable once, and every booking listed for the practice in WordPress. It works at 11pm, and without JavaScript.

The site moves: the sky follows the visitor’s own clock, the first visit plays step by step until you raise a hand, and the fee prints like a ticket. It is hidden from Google on purpose, because the practice is not real.

Named after the River Ouzel, which meets the Great Ouse at Newport Pagnell under Tickford Bridge. The mark is a water ouzel, the old name for the dipper: a round river bird on a stone, with the river as a smile beneath it.

The bridge’s iron rings, shrinking towards the middle of the span, became the pattern: the dividers, the progress, and the arch every photograph sits in. Fraunces and Lexend won from twelve typefaces set side by side.

Every page drawn before any of it was built, at desktop and phone width, in WordPress’s own block markup, from the same theme file the site uses.

Written for somebody who has put the dentist off: what happens, in order; the price before you sit down; and a raised hand that stops everything.

Not a bought theme with a name typed into it: a block theme written for the practice, with its own name, version and cover in WordPress, so it is plainly theirs.

Pages open in the editor inside the theme, header and footer included, so changing a price or a line looks just like the page a visitor sees. No page builder sits in between, and there is no licence to renew.

Booking is a plugin written for the practice, not one bought off a shelf: the free times worked out from the opening hours, each time bookable once, and every booking in an Appointments screen in the practice’s own colours.

It is built to be careful with patients: every check runs on the server, nobody is emailed what they wrote, and each booking is deleted 30 days after its time. As a plugin, the bookings stay if the theme ever changes.