Creative Healing Co is Ellen's virtual therapy practice in Colorado. The work is trauma-informed, focused on three specific audiences: people new to therapy, ADHD and gifted adults, and folks navigating an LDS / ex-Mormon / post-Mormon path. Sessions blend evidence-based talk therapy with creative and expressive modalities, including art, movement, music, and writing.
Strategy
The smallest build that does what a solo practitioner actually needs. Flat-file Statamic over a database, no appointment-booking widget on the site (Ellen handles intake personally through the contact form), no member portal, no e-commerce. The site's job is to communicate trust and specialty clearly enough that a prospective client feels comfortable reaching out.
Saying no to features keeps the surface area honest. A booking calendar would imply availability the practice can't reliably honor; a payment portal would skip the consult that decides whether the fit is right. The contact form is the front door, and that's the right front door for this kind of practice.
Design
Editorial layouts that favor warmth and approachability over the cold-medical feel typical of therapist sites. A custom Bard fieldset bundles reusable button, image, and three-column layout components so Ellen can compose new pages in the CP without writing markdown or knowing CSS. Color and typography are tuned to read as steady and welcoming, not clinical.
Development
Statamic 5 on Laravel 11, with Tailwind 4, Alpine, and Vite 7 on the frontend. The contact form routes through Mailgun with honeypot anti-spam protection. The site stays lean, around 10 content pages plus a small FAQ collection and a blog, so updates are quick and the editor surface is easy for one person to keep current.
Hosting and ops
Production runs on DigitalOcean via Laravel Forge. Mailgun handles the contact-form deliverability. Captcha protects the form from bot traffic. The whole stack is intentionally boring, no surprises for the next person who picks up the site to add a page or update a service description.
