Case study · Aesthetics · South Woodham Ferrers
Penny Woods Clinic
A laser hair removal and skin rejuvenation clinic in South Woodham Ferrers, with a password-gated holding page live while we build the full site.
The brief
Penny Woods Clinic is a laser hair removal and skin rejuvenation clinic at 83 Celeborn Street in South Woodham Ferrers. It describes itself as calm and private, with treatment tailored to the individual, and takes enquiries by phone and email.
The full site is still in build, so the domain needed something on it before the site was ready. A bare domain or a default hosting page would have sat under the clinic's name for the length of the build. The holding page had to look like the clinic and carry the name, town and contact details. It also had to let anyone with the password preview the site behind it without opening it to everyone else.
What we built
What is live today is a holding page. The home page and every site route on www.pennywoodsclinic.com redirect to /coming-soon, and the address without www redirects to the one with it, so for visitors there is one address. The page opens on an animated PW monogram over a looping background video. Under it sit a small line with the clinic's name and town, the headline 'Something beautiful is on its way.', and one paragraph saying the new site is nearly ready and what the clinic does. Below that sit a preview access form and direct phone and email links.
The preview access form is a password gate. It posts to the server, pauses briefly after a wrong password, and sends anyone with the right one through to the site behind it. The page is marked noindex and nofollow, so search engines are told to wait. It still carries structured data for the business: name, address, phone, email and opening hours, in the schema.org format search engines read for local businesses.
Once the password is accepted, the gate remembers the page a visitor was heading for and sends them there. The preview cookie lasts 30 days, so the clinic can hand out one password and reviewers are not asked for it on every visit.
The details that mattered
The PW monogram draws itself in. The SVG stroke traces over 2.6 seconds, fades out, and the filled mark settles in behind it. With reduced motion switched on, the trace is skipped and the settled mark shows at once.
The headline enters one word at a time. Each word starts blurred, transparent and slightly low, then lifts into place. The small line, paragraph, hairline divider, form and contact links follow in a stagger, each fading and lifting in turn. The word 'beautiful' is set in italic Fraunces; the rest sits at a light weight in the font's display cut.
Under the type is a muted, looping background video with a poster frame, held down by a dark radial gradient so the text stays legible. Three soft pools of cream light drift over it, and a faint film grain runs across the whole page.
The password field is a single off-white underline at a quarter opacity until focused, with a round arrow button, big enough to tap cleanly on a phone, that fills on hover. A wrong password shakes the field and returns focus to it. The button is named for screen readers, the status line is announced when it changes, and a skip link takes keyboard users straight to the content.
Fraunces and Hanken Grotesk are served from the site itself as variable fonts. The fallback fonts are adjusted to the same metrics, so the layout does not shift while they load. There are no third-party scripts, analytics tags or embeds anywhere on the page.