The situation

BASS provides applied behavior analysis therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder, delivered in clinics rather than in homes. At the time of the project it ran sixteen centers across Florida, from Jacksonville down through Gainesville and Ocala, the Tampa Bay clinics, the Daytona and Orange City sites, and out to St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Palm Harbor. The work is early intervention, focused on children under seven and particularly on two to four year olds. The company was owned by Parkstone GP, a private investment firm, whose partners ran the engagement alongside BASS’s own executives and the company’s marketing director.

What the client asked for was a tidier version of what already existed. Their own assessment was that the content was broadly right and simply needed reorganizing, tightening and refreshing.

The brief for tone was hopeful, optimistic and authoritative, aimed at a parent navigating the most stressful period of her life. Those three qualities pull against each other. Push authority and the site turns into a hospital. Push hope and it turns into a brochure. Most of the design judgment on this project went into holding that balance.

Strategy

The problem was not organization, and it took two forms.

The first was that the strongest thing about the company was the hardest thing to find. BASS measures and publishes its own clinical outcomes, which almost nobody in applied behavior analysis does. Competitors gesture at evidence-based care without putting numbers behind it. BASS had the numbers and had buried them in a subsection. That is a positioning problem wearing the costume of a layout problem, and it is why the outcome study ended up as a page of its own rather than a paragraph inside an About section.

The second problem did not surface until client review, and it is the more important one. The site had been structured for someone doing research. The person using it is not doing research. She wants to talk to a human being.

Three separate pieces of feedback arrived in the same week and described one problem between them. The primary call to action pushed a visitor into a form when many of them wanted to call. The phone number was tucked inside a contact page. Two buttons carried the same label and went to different places. And the consultation page put a wall of explanation in front of the form.

Read individually, those are four small usability notes. Read together, they say something harder: a frightened parent had been handed a considered piece of information architecture when what she needed was a phone number. We had designed for the calm version of the visitor. The client caught it, eight days before sign-off.

Klimt & Design’s approach

The phone number went into the sticky nav, and stayed there

The fix took three days and it is the most consequential decision on the site. A phone button went into the top navigation, carrying the number with the words “New Clients” underneath it. Because the nav is sticky, it follows the visitor down every page, on mobile and on desktop. It was added to the homepage hero and to the top of the consultation page as well, on the reasoning that a visitor who has already decided to call should never have to scroll to do it.

Checked eighteen months later, the button is still there and still reads the same way. That is a small piece of design and a large piece of empathy. It says: you do not have to navigate anything. Whatever page you have landed on, the person you need is one tap away.

The consultation page was rebuilt to somebody else’s data

The client’s paid media agency had been running conversion tests on BASS landing pages for a long time and held real evidence about what worked for this audience. Rather than defend our own layout, we asked them for their findings and rebuilt the page around them. The form moved directly beneath the hero. The page structure was simplified to match the contact page, which was already converting well. The heading changed, because the previous one was warm and did not tell a visitor what the page was.

Deferring to another agency’s testing over your own instinct is not a comfortable decision, and it is worth naming as a decision rather than leaving it as a detail. We had a preference. They had data. On a page whose only job is to convert a frightened parent into a conversation, the data wins, and saying so out loud is part of being useful rather than territorial.

The photography rule that carried the emotional strategy

The design brief specified that photography had to show professionals working with children in a therapy setting, visibly engaged in their role, with the tools of the job in frame. It explicitly ruled out imagery that read as a parent or family member with their child.

Every stock library will sell you a picture of a smiling adult and a happy child, and every one of those pictures says the wrong thing here. The parent already has love at home. What she is short of is qualified help. Making the clinician unmistakably a clinician is how the site stays warm without tipping into sentiment, and it is the difference between a site that offers sympathy and one that offers expertise.

Four sentences in a brief did more for the emotional register of this site than any color or type decision on it.

The compliance constraint the client brought, and the design absorbed

Partway through review, one of the BASS executives asked for a line of text beneath the testimonial section noting that the testimonials were unsolicited, from families no longer receiving services, in accordance with the BACB code of ethics.

The Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s code restricts how behavior analysts may solicit and use testimonials from the families they treat. This was the client knowing something we did not, and the right response was to absorb it into the design rather than negotiate it. The line sits under the testimonial section on the homepage, and it is on the live site today, word for word as they wrote it.

It is worth publishing for a second reason. A line like that, sitting quietly under a set of parent testimonials, is itself a trust signal to any reader who understands what it means.

The rest of the build

The site was built in Webflow. A location finder listed every clinic, with breadcrumbs from each location page back to the finder, and the finder linked from the top of the locations menu, because proximity is the first question a parent asks. Sixteen location pages carried address, phone, services and photographs of the actual building, so a parent knows what she is driving to.

The intake form is a Salesforce embed, restyled to sit inside the design rather than beside it. Thirteen insurance carrier logos were sourced and vectorized for the homepage, because for a lot of families that section is the page. A referrals path was built for pediatricians and schools, kept separate from the parent path, because they are two different readers arriving with two different questions. The careers section was wired to the client’s Greenhouse embed.

The outcome

The site went live in March 2025, replacing a WordPress site.

What is verifiable eighteen months on, checked in August 2026: the design is still in service, the “New Clients” phone button is still in the sticky nav, and the BACB disclaimer is still under the testimonial section. The location finder now serves twenty-one clinics rather than sixteen, which is the company’s growth rather than ours.

What is not here is a traffic number, and that is a real gap. The migration went through the client’s paid media agency, tracking was configured, and analytics were live. Nobody on either side recorded a before and after reading. If you are evaluating this page as evidence of conversion work, evaluate the decisions, which are documented and specific, and discount the outcome accordingly.

What the client said, unprompted, during final review and at sign-off:

“I really, really like this work. Thank you for all the creativity. It is super clean and organized.” Dave Morell, BASS ABA Therapy, 1 March 2025

“Thank you for the excellent product! This looks great.” Dave Morell, BASS ABA Therapy, 7 March 2025

The strongest signal was not about the site at all. Thirteen days after launch, the investor who commissioned the project introduced Klimt & Design to another healthcare company on the strength of the branding, deck and website work, and that introduction produced a live conversation the next day.

Why we would show you this

A clinic network treating small children is probably not your business, and the constraints here are specific: an ethics code governing testimonials, an insurance question that decides half the inquiries, and a visitor who is frightened.

The part that transfers is the difference between a considered site and a usable one. This project produced a well-structured, well-organized website that had been tested against the wrong task. Nothing in the visual design changed to fix it. A phone number moved into the sticky nav, a form moved above the fold, and two buttons stopped saying the same thing in two different places.

If your customers arrive at a hard moment rather than a curious one, the useful test before launch is not whether the site explains you well. It is whether the thing a frightened person needs is reachable from wherever they happen to land, without reading anything first.