Website Template Customization | Heather Caplan, RD

It was truly an honor to get to customize a website template for Heather Caplan, and I'm so excited to announce its launch today!

If you haven't met Heather, you absolutely should. She's such a down-to-earth human who's passionate about weight inclusivity in the healthcare & running spaces, and is truly someone I look up to. As a matter of fact, she actually was one of my first bigger media exposures as a dietitian with a private practice when she invited me on the (now retired) RD Real Talk podcast! She's worked in quite a few spaces since, and it was so fun to pull it all together with this project.

About the Project

Heather came to me for help in creating a more evergreen version of her website that points people to the right places to find her current work. As she had her website designed when she was running a private practice and is now the founder & CEO of Weight Inclusive Nutrition & Dietetics, as well as co-founder of the Lane 9 Project.

This was a bit of a unique project in that Heather doesn't need her original URL/website to necessarily drive traffic – but she has piles and piles of backlinks, past projects, and visibility and wanted to organize it all neatly into a landing page-type site.

She chose the Jess template from my template shop and we worked together to refresh the copy. We also incorporated her original brand from Morgan Sinclair Designs (extra fun considering Morgan and I are great friends)!

Website Strategy

Heather didn't need a services page – but she did want a Homepage, About page, and Contact page to help organize and direct people to the right place. We updated the copy for these pages and swapped out links in the main navigation for her current roles (WIND and Lane 9 Project).

Now, it was time to consider the mountain of backlinks & search engine traffic that point to Heather through her retired podcast, RD Real Talk – and this is where design + functionality + strategy majorly intertwine when it comes to adjusting your website to suit your business needs!

Because Heather has:

• Two other established businesses with their own websites and traffic
• Minimal need for this website to generate traffic
• Tons of likely broken links from past, archived episodes of RD Real Talk that would lead to people Googling it/her

We opted to customize the error/404 page for the Jess template by adding content about the RD Real Talk podcast, and we designed a custom landing page for RD Real Talk that includes a beautifully written note from Heather about the ending of the show + her current ventures.