Rhode Island Spine Center
A warm clinic website, chosen from nine design directions, with real clinical tooling and a physician-referral funnel.
- Client
- Rhode Island Spine Center
- Location
- Cranston, Rhode Island
- What we built
- Patient site · clinical tooling · referral funnel
- Stack
- Astro 7 · Tailwind v4 · JaneApp
The patient’s side of the practice
Rhode Island Spine Center is Dr. Donald Murphy’s spine-care clinic in Cranston, RI. Its message is direct: “Overcome pain. Return to your life.”
The audience is patients, local, often in pain, deciding whether to book, so the site had to feel warm and trustworthy rather than clinical. It is one door of two: Dr. Murphy’s professional site speaks to lawyers and administrators in navy and gold. Here it is warm teal reassurance.
- 9 design directions built as working sites before one won
- 49 exercises in 8 categories, in the handout printer
- $100 flat first visit $50 follow-up, stated up front
Source: rhodeislandspinecenter.com and the design directions we presented, September 2026.
From “why does it hurt” to “I’ve got this”
The clinic’s method is four plain steps: find the source, treat it precisely, self-care from day one, and you take over. “Our goal is to make sure you don’t need us long-term.” The site follows the same path, and ends with tools a clinician uses in the room.
Nine directions, one decision
Rather than argue about a look in the abstract, we built nine complete design directions with the real clinic content inside, each a working site the client could browse. The teal “MD” identity won: design 3 first, refined into design 9, now live. The alternates are retired, so they appear here as palettes, not screenshots.
-
02 Paradigm Shift
Dark, high-contrast: an electric-mint edge on black & white.
-
03 MD Hospital
Clean medical teal, big rounded cards.
First winner
-
04 Dental Clinic
Warm coral marketing energy.
-
05 Medicare Dentist
Traditional teal-to-blue, serif type.
-
06 The Ultimate
Modern navy SaaS glassmorphism, amber pop.
-
07 Healing Nature
Organic spa: sage, terracotta, cream.
-
08 MD Medical Center
The teal identity, rebuilt on Tailwind v4.
-
09 MD Healthcare
The teal identity: final, shipped, now live.
Winner · live
Eight of the nine directions (design 01 was the first baseline pass).
The result
Rhode Island Spine Center is live at rhodeislandspinecenter.com: warm teal, self-hosted Urbanist and Mulish type, big rounded cards, a CSS-only “spine” progress marker that ticks down the page, and articles by Dr. Murphy marked up for search and answer engines. Patient testimonials are shown initials-only with an “individual results may vary” note; we added no patient counts, star ratings or named quotes.
For engineersNine builds, the iOS print fix, and what’s underneath
Nine directions. Each was a separate Astro build with its own
base: '/designN', compiled into public/designN/: nine real
sites at nine URLs. Once the teal identity won, the alternates were removed entirely.
Printing. iOS Safari ignores CSS print page size, so the Print button
falls back to a server-side Puppeteer PDF endpoint and the handout prints identically
on any device. Handout copy carries {reps} and
{times-per-day} tokens the composer fills in.
Craft. Subset woff2 fonts, preloaded with font-display:
swap. Link text darkened from #00A8BC to #007D8E for
WCAG AA contrast. The spine marker runs on animation-timeline: scroll()
with no JavaScript. A navigation flash under View Transitions, caused by scroll-reveal
elements starting at opacity: 0, was fixed by aligning the two
lifecycles.
Stack. Static Astro, kept current from 5 to 7, on Vercel; Tailwind
v4’s CSS-first @theme; hand-authored <picture> WebP;
FAQPage and Article JSON-LD; an
llms.txt; JaneApp booking.
A warm brand patients trust, and real tools that do clinic work.