Case Study: How We Redesigned the Australian Society of Hypnosis WA Website in One Week

The Australian Society of Hypnosis WA is a not-for-profit society that trains registered health and mental-health practitioners in clinical hypnosis. Its main offer is a 100-hour course, taught live online over seven weekends. Its website had fallen behind that course, and we had one week to replace it.

See the new site for yourself: www.ashwa.org.au, the live Australian Society of Hypnosis WA website.

The short version: In one week we designed and launched a new website for the Australian Society of Hypnosis WA. It was designed to look like the professional training body the Society is, it costs $0 a year to host on the Society’s own accounts, 28 old pages and posts became 12 clear ones, and the fee, the hours and an online application now sit up front, with every course date on the home page. The new site went live on 28 October 2026, at www.ashwa.org.au.

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One week, start to finish

In that one week we:

• designed the new site from scratch, on phones and computers;
• built 12 pages around the wording the Society had signed off in writing, and checked all 186 approved lines against the finished pages before launch;
• built the online application and contact forms;
• set up a click-to-edit editor so the Society can change its own words;
• forwarded every old page address to the right new page;
• launched on 28 October 2026.

The old site’s words, its faculty biographies and all 117 files in its media library were saved before the switch, so nothing was lost.

1. The design upgrade: before and after

The old site was captured on the morning of 28 October 2026, just before the new site replaced it. The new site was captured on 8 November 2026, and you can compare it with the live version at www.ashwa.org.au.

Home page on a computer (old on top, new below). Before, the first screen was a blurred photo of a lecture hall with the label “2026 Programme Update”. After, the site has a calm navy and serif design, chosen to suit a professional training body, and a first screen that says what the course is: 100 hours of live training over seven weekends, for a $2,950 total fee.

Home page on a phone (old on the left, new on the right). On the old site the main heading split “Hypnotherapy” in the middle of the word. On the new site the heading breaks between words, and the apply button sits on the first screen.

Other things that changed with the design:

• The footer said “Copyright © 2018”. It now reads © 2026.
• The Faculty page uses the Society’s new standard biographies, with each lecturer’s role shown under their name.

2. What it saves the Australian Society of Hypnosis WA

Hosting is now $0 a year. The site runs on Cloudflare’s free plan. The code, the editor and the form emails also run on free plans. The only regular bill left is the yearly renewal of the ashwa.org.au domain name.

The old hosting can go. Once the new site has been watched for a couple of weeks after launch, the old WordPress hosting can be cancelled, and its fee goes with it.

No upkeep for an old system. The old site ran on WordPress and an out-of-date version of PHP (the programming language WordPress runs on). The new site has no WordPress, no PHP and no plugins (add-on software) to keep patched.

The Society edits its own site. The Society’s editor signs in, clicks the words on the page, types and saves. Dates, words and participant quotes can all be changed this way. Changes are live in 2 to 4 minutes, and every change is kept in a history, so a mistake can be undone.

The Society owns all of it. The website, its words and pictures, its code and the ashwa.org.au domain name belong to the Society. The hosting, code, editor and form accounts were opened in its own name, so it is never locked in to us.

3. Easier to find your way around

Every main page is one click away. The old menu had four items (Home, About Us, Training and Contact), with the rest tucked into drop-down lists. The new menu shows every main page in one row: Home, The Training, Course Content, Faculty, Who Can Apply, Participant Feedback, About ASH WA, FAQ and Contact, with an Apply for a place button beside them.

28 pages and posts became 12. Several old pages were never part of the Society’s message. There were WordPress’s default “Sample Page” and “Hello world!” post, both dated September 2018. “Amenities” and “Pricing” pages still held a theme’s placeholder text; the Pricing page advertised a $39 a month co-working desk. Four more pages belonged to a practitioner directory that was no longer in use. The new site keeps only the pages a reader needs: Home, The Training, Course Content, Faculty, Who Can Apply, Participant Feedback, About, FAQ, Contact, Apply, Privacy and Terms.

Old links still work. Every old page address forwards to the closest new page. Pages that moved use a 301 redirect, a permanent “this page has moved” signal that browsers and Google both follow. Bookmarks, links from other websites and old search results land on a useful page instead of an error.

Search engines were told. We set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (free tools that show how a site appears in search) and submitted the new sitemap, the list of pages search engines should read.

4. More reasons to apply, and an easier way to do it

The answers come first. A practitioner weighing a 100-hour course wants to know the cost, the time and the dates. The old home page mentioned seven weekend modules, but showed no fee, no dates and no total hours on screen, and still said full program information would be “released shortly”. The new home page shows the hours, the weekends and the fee at the top, and lists all seven weekend dates of the 2026-27 program further down (old on top, new below).

Who can apply has its own page. Eligibility decides whether a reader applies at all, so the professional requirements have a page of their own, linked from the menu and the home page.

One clear next step. Every page leads to an Apply for a place button. The old site had separate forms for a scholarship and a super early bird offer, both from rounds that had closed. The new site has one online application for the current program. It takes the applicant’s full details, with uploads of their CV and registration evidence, and runs an automatic spam check. The Society receives the answers and files by email, a copy is saved in a database in its own account, and the applicant gets an email confirming it arrived.

Results so far. The site went live on 28 October 2026, which is too soon for fair search or application numbers. We will add them here once there is enough data.

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