A clinic that edits its own website and hardly ever needs to call us

The challenge

Centro Ocular Dr. Rincón has been operating in Bogotá for more than twenty-five years, across two locations, with an ophthalmology practice that runs from diagnosis through to surgery. We started in 2020, with a WordPress site that had accumulated problems over the years:

• Slow. A patient looking up information about a surgery and waiting for it to load does not wait.
• Awkward on mobile. The information didn’t fit a phone screen, which is where most people arrive from.
• A palette that didn’t help reading. It was hard to tell what mattered and where to click.
• A form that sometimes arrived and sometimes didn’t.
• Hard to maintain. The mix of third-party extensions meant updating broke things, so updating stopped, and an installation left without updates keeps accumulating risk.

The form that sometimes arrived

It deserves its own section, because it affects appointments directly.

A message that doesn’t arrive from a clinic’s website is a person who asked for an appointment and believed they had. There’s no error notice, no retry, nobody who knows that message ever existed. And the worst part of an intermittent failure is that it goes unnoticed: because most of them do arrive, nobody suspects any are missing.

We moved sending off the server itself and onto a transactional email service, Brevo. The underlying difference is that every send now leaves a record: you can check whether it went out, whether it was delivered, and when. It went from trusting to being able to verify.

Why leave WordPress

We rebuilt the site with TinaCMS on Next.js, with static output. That removes both the public admin panel and the chain of third-party extensions that needed watching: what has to be defended shrinks to what we wrote ourselves, and updating stops being a risky operation.

The clinic set the requirements and trusted us with the architecture. A WordPress needs a server running, interpreting PHP and querying a database on every visit, and that server has to be maintained. A site compiled before it is published only needs finished files to be delivered. For a clinic, which publishes rarely and needs what it publishes to be always available, it is a good fit: nothing is running that can go down, and nothing needs patching every month.

Content moved into version-controlled files alongside the code. It sounds like an internal detail and it has a very practical consequence: every change is recorded and reversible. The “someone touched something and now the page is gone” scenario goes away.

Design, readability and mobile

We rebuilt the palette around what a healthcare site needs: enough contrast to read without effort, and a clear hierarchy between what informs and what invites you to book. Colour, more than decorating, helps the information get used.

And the site is fully responsive: the same information reads just as well on a phone, which is how most patients arrive.

A site the clinic runs itself

TinaCMS puts editing inside the site itself: you navigate to the page and edit it there, seeing the result. Publishing an article or correcting a contact detail stopped being a complicated operation and became something simple and safe to manage from the clinic itself.

A site that gives no reason to call

Since then the relationship has been on-demand support: we get called in for specific developments, and months can pass between one and the next. For us that is the best sign the website is working. There are no pending updates to review, no form to keep an eye on, no server to look after. What the clinic wanted was a website that wasn’t a problem, and it hasn’t been one since.