Speech Therapy Plans: Website Rebuild

Speech Therapy Plans (STP) provides fun solutions for Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) to engage their students with personalized, comprehensive speech therapy lessons and materials. STP’s pre-selected materials and plans help students and therapists reclaim their nights, weekends, and time with family.

Speech Therapy Plans Logo

Our Challenge

After taking on their website from a previous freelancer and originally updating it, the client wanted to continue adding more robust and dynamic features to make the website and its dashboard a great tool for SLPs to use daily in their businesses. This website is used by individual therapists, parents who are teaching their children, and school districts all over the nation.

With this information, our agency and client decided it was time to rebuild the entire website. The most feasible, cost-effective way to get the client to increase her membership base was with a fresh design and new platform.  This would allow us to build a foundation and expand on how SLPs currently use the Speech Therapy Plans platform and to provide the best learning experience for their students. With the website design, we wanted to take a very friendly and airy approach to this build because of the user base and to inject the client’s brand personality into the website.

Some of the website requests included creating a simple user interface for new therapists to register for a free 7-day trial or a paid membership, existing therapists to monitor student progress on skills, easily manage content, intricate features requested from other therapists, and the ability to easily transfer the data from the old website to the new one. 

  • Create a brand new, functional membership platform after untangling and enhancing an off-shore developed website
  • Develop robust, dynamic features to increase learning and engagement within speech-language pathologists’ lessons and students
  • Provide an efficient method for managing all therapy materials within the caseload and planning management systems
  • Detailed technical scope of work laying out every feature and how it will function or connect to other parts of the website
  • Simple, streamlined design to allow users to navigate the site with ease and quickly accomplish their tasks
  • Laravel-based website allows for scaling features effectively, while also allowing the possibility of an app down the road

Our Solution

After building the relationship with the client with version 1 of the website, we had numerous ideas with more features to add to the redesigned version. TM decided the website framework Laravel was the best platform to house everything STP needed to make the business successful. First, we started with our design process to refresh the look and feel of the website.

Design

Our design team completed some light visual work on the previous website. We injected STP’s brand personality further into the website to attract new members and keep the existing members engaged. 

First, we designed the front end with extensive dashboard comps and wireframes, which allowed us to get pretty specific with how items would function. To give it a fun flair, we incorporated various teacher and classroom illustrations that would relate back to the topic at hand. We also used organic shapes in the background to give movement and life, which gives a very accessible and friendly feel throughout. 

For first-time users and those still on the fence about purchasing a membership, we carefully explain the membership and its benefits logically. The And You’re Saying It Only Gets Better? the section focuses on the skills and included materials, like monthly plans and themed word lists. This helps SLPs understand what they can expect from the dashboard, then they can take action to sign up for a free trial for further exploration. 

Within the dashboard’s home page, we included everything an SLP will need quick access to, including a daily schedule calendar, shortcut buttons to add new students and events, a listing of the core materials for the premade plan of the month, new materials so you can see what is fresh, and hot links so the client can provide links to relevant blogs or social posts. These pages also retained the subtle touches from the main home page for consistency.

Web Development

To start building out the website, we developed the Laravel component and a custom CMS with the most popular WYSIWYG (TinyMCE) for managing editable content. From there, we mapped each section to the key areas of the website with the ability to add additional manageable sections and link them to an area displays on the front end of the website. We also created a custom importer that maps the data from the existing database into the newly defined structure of the Laravel database.

Laravel has eloquent database models and methods for creating relationships between the various data models. Laravel helps to better facilitate many-to-many relationships easily. These are relationships in which one model (table) has a link to many other items in another table and vice versa. A much simpler model is the one-to-one relationship or one-to-many relationship which WordPress is very capable of. However, the prolific need for many-to-many relationships made a custom application built on Laravel the obvious choice.

After solidifying our platform choice, we began developing each specifically requested feature. We created a caseload feature for SLPs to easily track their students and make student groups for their individual students to accommodate SLPs in a school system. This also all ties in with the calendar, so SLPs are able to assign students, groups, and materials to a schedule so they always know what’s coming up next for their students. We also developed a user interface chart to pull complex data from the backend and display progress reports in a chart form. This data is easily downloadable as an image file.

The website’s new features include:

  • Caseload management, or the ability to track the progress of individual students from a variety of grade levels 
  • Schedule out sessions, create recurring events and reminders, and log session notes right from their calendar
  • A massive material library with digital, print, and video materials for SLPs to use for their students
  • A custom blog complete with categories, tags, featured images, and comments
  • Integration with Stripe to easily allow SLPs to sign up and purchase memberships 
  • A robust filter system to find relevant content based on the student’s disability, grade, assignments, and much more

With the completely new version of STP live and thriving, memberships have almost doubled, and the client is receiving rave reviews from her SLP members about how easy and efficient the dashboard is for managing their students. With STP as a monthly maintenance client, we’re continuing to enhance the website by adding new features and stepping in to handle some of their digital marketing efforts. 

Caseload Management

We implemented a system for therapists to create goals and track their progress in relation to the student’s skills. It’s a HIPAA-compliant goal form for therapists to share with their students. Therapists can also make student groups based on the individual students in the caseload section to accommodate SLP’s that work in a school atmosphere. This also all ties in with the calendar, so they are able to assign students, groups, and materials to their schedule to know what’s coming up next.

Event Scheduling

Therapists can schedule and manage their individual and group student sessions with robust features. We create custom Javascript logic for therapists to view the calendar at a weekly or monthly view, attach supporting documents, assign goals for a specific session, and log progress and notes as well.

Learning Media Library

Lastly, the website houses a massive media library, including digital, print, and video materials, for SLPs to use for their students. SLPs can filter therapy materials for the intended grade level, material type, month posted, and much more.