All Work
Case Study · 2026

Crystal Palace Osteopathy.

Client
Virginia Spencer-Smith, Registered Osteopath
Location
32 Westow Hill, SE19 1RX
Scope
Design, Build, SEO, Migration
Year
2026
osteopathcrystalpalace.co.uk
Crystal Palace Osteopathy homepage hero — 'Osteopathy in Crystal Palace' headline over the Crystal Palace transmitter with call-to-action buttons
01 — The Brief

An established practice, a site that
wasn't carrying its weight.

Crystal Palace Osteopathy has been treating patients in SE19 for years. Virginia has a waiting list. The website hadn't kept up. Hard to read on a phone, slow to load, and buried on page three of Google for osteopath Crystal Palace. Patients were finding her by word of mouth, which is great until it isn't.

02 — Approach

Rebuild it from the ground up.
Keep what worked.

01 · Design

Editorial, not clinical.

Warm palette. Instrument Serif for the display headings. One signature photograph of a woman holding her lower back, stopping the scroll where every other physio site fades into stock imagery.

02 · Build

Hand-coded, no bloat.

No CMS, no plugins, no tracking bloat. Ships as static HTML and a handful of WebP assets. Lighthouse 98 on mobile. Under 300KB on first load.

03 · SEO

Full MedicalBusiness schema.

Geo coordinates, opening hours, areas served, practitioner credentials. Everything Google needs to show her at the top of the local pack for osteopath Crystal Palace.

Detail 01 · Under the hood

The same page,
two views.

The Conditions & Services section: 'What We Treat' label, 'Conditions & Services' heading, featured Pregnancy-Related Care and Trapped Nerves cards, then a grid of six treatment categories
What patients see: the Conditions & Services grid.

What Google sees is different. Every card in that grid, every treatment category, every address line and opening hour is typed directly into a hand-written MedicalBusiness JSON-LD block in the <head>. No plugin, no generator, no CMS plumbing. Four separate schema blocks totaling 272 lines of structured data, wired by hand and validated against the Rich Results Test.

  • Dual @type: ["MedicalBusiness", "HealthAndBeautyBusiness"]. Covers both health intent and local services intent without keyword stuffing.
  • 16 areaServed entries. Crystal Palace, Dulwich, Sydenham, Penge, Bromley, Croydon and 10 more. Primary location carries GeoCoordinates (51.4186, -0.0765).
  • 4 EducationalOccupationalCredential entries on the practitioner. BSc(Hons), ITEC, APNT, NLSMR. Each with recognizedBy. Registered with the General Osteopathic Council.
  • Explicit openingHoursSpecification. dayOfWeek as an array. No string parsing, no ambiguity for the crawler.
  • Four separate blocks. MedicalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, WebSite. Split so Google can index each independently.
  • Zero runtime JavaScript for the schema. Ships static in the initial HTML. First byte already contains everything the crawler needs. 
// index.html · head · schema[0]
{
  "@type": ["MedicalBusiness",
           "HealthAndBeautyBusiness"],
  "medicalSpecialty": [
    "Musculoskeletal",
    "PhysicalTherapy",
    "RehabilitativeMedicine"
  ],
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude":  51.4186,
    "longitude": -0.0765
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday",
                  "Wednesday",
                  "Friday"],
    "opens":  "10:00",
    "closes": "20:00"
  }],
  "employee": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Virginia Spencer-Smith",
    "hasCredential": [
      { "name": "BSc(Hons) Osteopathy" },
      { "name": "ITEC Massage Therapy" },
      { "name": "APNT Sports Injury" },
      { "name": "NLSMR Remedial" }
    ]
  }
}
Schema blocks
4
Structured data
272 lines
Runtime JS
0 KB
Initial HTML
66 KB
CSS
42 KB
Hero image
116 KB WebP
Detail 02 · Editorial

The photograph
that stops the scroll.

Editorial 'A hands-on approach to pain relief' section with a photograph of a woman holding her lower back on a warm cream background
What patients see: the editorial pain-relief spread.

Every other physio site in SE London fades into stock imagery — latex gloves, neon adjustment tables, a pair of hands on a spine no patient can see their own body in. This one stops on a single photograph: a woman holding her lower back. She isn't a clinician. She's the reason someone Googles "osteopath" at 11pm on a Tuesday. The editorial sits on warm cream, serif display at Instrument Serif, body at Space Grotesk. No overlay, no gradient, no gimmick.

  • Two fonts, doing real work. Instrument Serif Italic for the display phrase. Space Grotesk for the body. The tension between the two IS the editorial voice.
  • Warm off-white, never #FFF. #FAFAF8 on the section, #1A1A1A on the text. Pure white is a stock-site tell.
  • Art-directed for mobile. Desktop shot is landscape, anchored right. Mobile serves a recropped portrait at 390×844 through <picture> with a max-width: 768px source — not a squashed version of the desktop frame.
  • Clip-path wipe on reveal. The photograph is "wiped" into view from left to right on scroll using clip-path: inset(0 100% 0 0) → inset(0). Cinematic, not generic. Zero GSAP.
  • Text wraps, never widows. text-wrap: balance on the display line. max-width: 65ch on the body paragraph. One long word at the end is a design bug, not a feature.
  • One image, 38 KB. Full-width WebP, quality 82, lazy-loaded. No DOM elements around it waiting for JavaScript. 
/* editorial.css */
.editorial__display {
  font-family: 'Instrument Serif',
               serif;
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: clamp(2.25rem,
                   5vw, 4.5rem);
  line-height: 0.95;
  letter-spacing: -0.02em;
  text-wrap: balance;
}

.editorial__body {
  font-family: 'Space Grotesk',
               sans-serif;
  max-width: 65ch;
  line-height: 1.6;
}

.editorial__figure img {
  /* clip-path wipe */
  clip-path: inset(0 100% 0 0);
  transition: clip-path 700ms
    cubic-bezier(0.16, 1,
                 0.3, 1);
}
.editorial__figure.revealed img {
  clip-path: inset(0);
}
Fonts
2, self-hosted
Display type
Instrument Serif
Body type
Space Grotesk
Mobile art direction
Portrait recrop
Reveal
Clip-path wipe
Editorial image
38 KB WebP
03 — Outcome

Live in under two weeks.

98
Lighthouse, mobile
12days
Brief to live
0
Templates used

The site is live at osteopathcrystalpalace.co.uk. Virginia got a site she can send people to without a wince. I got my first case study.

If you run a local business in Crystal Palace, East Dulwich, Peckham, Herne Hill, Forest Hill, or anywhere across South East London and your website isn't doing its job, get in touch. The process is the same. See pricing for the full breakdown.

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