A generic template, replaced by a practice that finally feels like her.
Healing Cycles Therapy is the brand identity, website, and messaging system built over a few weeks for Dyshni Sritharan, a Toronto-based Registered Social Worker, replacing a generic, clinical-feeling site with one that speaks directly to the women she actually treats.
The problem
A clinical-sounding site, for a practice that’s anything but.
The existing site was generic and slightly cold, the kind of DIY template that could belong to any practice, at a moment when the people Dyshni most needed to reach had to feel specifically seen, not processed. Culturally-attuned, trauma-informed care doesn’t land if the first impression reads like a waiting room.
Her actual audience is specific: women who’ve “been strong long enough”: carrying anxiety in their bodies, overthinking but still stuck, aware of their patterns but not experiencing real change. The old site never said that out loud. It just implied “therapy,” generically.
There was a second, quieter problem underneath: Dyshni’s practice draws on a wide range of specific approaches (CBT, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, Narrative Therapy, attachment-based work), a credibility asset, but also easy to bury someone in jargon. The site had to hold both: feel warm on first read, and still list the credentials (RSW, MSW) that make it trustworthy.
Process
The system
What I’d do differently
Naming the audience as specifically as I did was the right call, but I made that decision almost entirely on instinct. Next time I’d actually talk to two or three women in that audience rather than design toward an assumption of what would resonate.