Hypnosis & Health

The migration was the hard part

Rebuilding the pages is the visible work; not losing the twenty years is the work that decides whether the rebuild was worth doing. Every legacy address — the 2006 flat HTML files, the WordPress permalinks, the .co.uk mirror, the osCommerce product URLs — was catalogued and mapped to its successor page.

The redirect map is compiled from a single spreadsheet into an Apache configuration by a script, and it is emitted *before* the canonicalisation rules, with absolute targets. That ordering matters: it means a legacy URL reaches its final page in one hop instead of bouncing through an https rule and then a www rule and then a trailing-slash rule, shedding a little equity at each stop.

Where a page had genuinely been withdrawn rather than moved — rights-encumbered material, mostly — the URL returns 410 Gone rather than redirecting to the home page. A redirect there would have harvested link equity earned by hosting somebody else's work, and that is not equity the site should keep.

Static, and therefore not a liability

The old stack was a maintenance surface: a database, an admin login, plugins to keep patched. The rebuild compiles to flat HTML. There is no login to attack, no plugin to leave unpatched, and no query to wait on — which is also why the same server can host it alongside everything else without noticing.

The only dynamic parts are a handful of single-file PHP endpoints for the things that genuinely need a server: the contact form, checkout, and signed download links. They sit beside the static build, their configuration lives outside the web root, and they fail closed rather than guessing.

Designed as an illustrated encyclopedia

The design brief was a reference book rather than a clinic brochure: ivory paper, dark ink, a deep teal for the apparatus, and five annotation colours that appear inside diagrams, topic identities and callout keylines but never as wall paint. Running text stays ink on paper throughout.

The diagrams are drawn as inline SVG rather than sourced as stock: the stress response, the sleep cycle, breathing mechanics, an anxiety decision tree. They are part of the argument each page is making, they scale to any screen without a second request, and they are properly labelled for a screen reader.

Accessibility as a build gate

Every colour pairing in the design system is measured against its WCAG floor by a script, and the deploy refuses to run if one drops. This is not a report produced at the end of a project — it is a gate in the pipeline, which is the only version of the practice that survives contact with a deadline.

One colour in the original palette failed outright: an amber that measured 2.00:1 on the page ground, meaning an amber keyline would have been invisible to a large number of readers. Rather than lose the colour, it ships in three separate grades — one for flat fills inside a diagram, one that clears 3:1 for strokes, one that clears 4.5:1 for any coloured word. Every other colour in the family carries the same three grades for consistency.

Two audiences, one site

The site serves people looking for help and practitioners looking for professional material, and these want opposite things from the same subject. Rather than compromise into a single lukewarm structure, the site forks: thirteen public topic hubs organised the way a worried reader scans, and a separate practitioner section with scripts, language patterns and technique notes.

Navigation follows the fork. An illustrated panel shows all thirteen topics at once — icon, colour, name, one-line promise — because on a content-rich site the reader needs to *see* what is there, and a thin dropdown hides it.