London Pain Consultants

London Pain Consultants is a Harley Street clinic for the treatment of pain.

We were fortunate enough to have the site featured in the CSS Mania World Web Design Awards 2006 in the Institutions category.

The development featured Web Standards methods and best practice with a special focus on accessibility for impaired users. All features were built specifically for this project to work with or without JavaScript or styling. With that in mind a larger default font size was also employed. A flexible layout was also used ñ the pages expand to make best use of the screen space most commonly available to visitors and they also contract to fit in to smaller screen sizes without breaking.

The treatment of pain is an evolving science so the site was built to be easily updated by staff and informative for patients and fellow medics. Rather than developing a brochure we built the site around our Axi weblog to enable the staff to add articles and case studies in a text editing interface that would be familiar to them.

For the audience we also included a live search function that searches the whole site as soon as a visitor begins typing to enable them to find information quickly. The conditions section also features a pseudo image-map to allow users to select parts of the body affected by a given condition to discover more information.

In order for surfers to find the site we used semantic information design ethics throughout, not only providing users with a more informative experience but also optimising the site for search engines and other web aggregators. When we last checked on 14th November 2006 ó and without any supplemental marketing ó the site appeared on page one of the Google.com results for “pain consultants” (screenshot image).

London Pain Consultants may well be the first weblog written by Consultants to focus on the treatment of pain. Reports suggest that a great many people are using the material available to research their own treatment and the practice has received inquiries and patients via the site from as far away as Texas and Hawaii.

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