Marula Dental Studio

Many dental practice websites are a single page with a list of treatments and a phone number. Nervous patients cannot see what a first visit involves, nobody explains how fees and medical aid co-payments work, and someone with a knocked-out tooth on a Saturday morning gets no help at all. Dentists also cannot market themselves like other businesses: the HPCSA's Ethical Rules of Conduct rule out claims of superior skill, testimonials, discounts and inducements, and specialist titles a practitioner does not hold. The brief was to build a warm, calm site that does real work for patients and stays inside those rules.

We built a fast, sixteen-page static Next.js site on the cream and teal palette of the logo. The home page leads with family dentistry explained as you go, then treatments, a step-by-step first visit, a section for nervous patients, the emergency guide, the team, typical fees, opening hours and patient guides. Each of the five treatments has its own page with what it includes, aftercare, fees, a step-by-step process and questions. A fees and medical aid page explains direct claims, co-payments and written quotes, and three patient guides cover knocked-out tooth first aid, a child's first visit and dental co-payments. The emergency guide works out the next step from three questions and brings the answer into view on mobile, and the booking flow picks up the reason for the visit from treatment pages. Because the practice is fictional, the booking confirmation states clearly that nothing was sent or stored. The site also includes a POPIA privacy notice covering health information, a disclaimer, Dentist, MedicalWebPage, Article, FAQPage and breadcrumb schema, security headers and a full sitemap.

• Checked the name before designing anything: no South African practice trades as Marula Dental, and the marula tree gave the mark its leaf
• Wrote the logo prompt, then rebuilt the approved logo as clean vectors: the tooth as one even, perfectly symmetrical line, the leaf traced from the original, and a heavier-line favicon that still reads at 16 pixels
• Matched the web fonts to the logo lettering: Fraunces at the logo's soft setting for the wordmark and headings, Poppins for labels and body text
• Took the palette from the logo and checked every text colour against WCAG AA contrast, adding deeper and lighter sage shades where the original leaf colour was too light for text
• Wrote all copy within the HPCSA's advertising rules: no superiority claims, no testimonials or before-and-after photos, no specials, no specialist titles, and fees shown as factual ranges
• Built a three-question "what should I do right now?" guide that gives first aid steps for knocked-out and broken teeth, toothache and bleeding, and sends people to hospital when there are red flags
• Built a four-step appointment booking with a dentist preference, Saturday and late-evening slots, and medical aid details
• Added metric-matched fallback fonts and fixed the font's optical size so the page does not jump while fonts load

• Custom logo rebuilt as clean vectors, with a full brand kit and a favicon that holds up at 16 pixels
• Emergency first aid guide with hospital red flags, built from current first aid guidance
• Four-step online booking with dentist preference, Saturday slots and South African public holidays
• Fees, medical aid and co-payments explained in plain language, with typical fee ranges
• Copy written within the HPCSA's advertising rules, with a POPIA notice for health information
• Lighthouse on mobile: 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO on every page tested, 97 to 99 for performance
• Zero layout shift on mobile and desktop, even when the web fonts load slowly
• Pure static build with no database, so pages load fast and there is very little to maintain

The concept shows that a dental website can feel calm and personal while doing practical work: settling nervous patients, explaining costs before anyone sits in the chair and helping people in pain know what to do. For a real practice, the same foundation can connect to its practice management software for live appointment times and reminders.