A Clinic Site With Three Different Logos

The site

Four physiotherapists and a massage therapist share a clinic in a medical building beside a suburban shopping centre. Most new patients arrive from doctors' referrals and local searches.

The header shows the clinic's original logo, a stylised running figure in teal, built into a wide banner image with an old tagline and the phone number.

The footer shows the logo the clinic adopted two years ago: a cleaner mark in navy and orange, the one on the sign outside and on the business cards.

The online booking page, run by a booking service at its own web address, shows a third version: an early draft of the new logo, slightly stretched, in colours that match neither.

The inference a visitor makes

A first-time visitor does not think about branding. They notice, without putting it into words, that the site does not quite hang together.

Three logos suggest a business that has changed hands, merged with another, or stopped paying attention. Any of those is a reason to look at the next clinic on the list.

For a clinic, the doubt lands at the most sensitive moment. The booking page asks for a date of birth, contact details and the reason for the visit, and it is the page that looks least like the clinic.

The patient's question is simple: is this really them? A site that makes them ask has already lost some of the people who would have booked.

How three logos accumulated

Nobody chose three logos. Each arrived through a reasonable decision by a different person at a different time.

• The header was built as one image with the original website.
• The footer was changed by staff through a widget after the rebrand.
• The booking page got whatever file was handy the day it was set up.
• The sign and cards went to the printer with the final version.

The first explains why the old logo survived. A logo baked into a banner image needs the original design files and someone who can edit them, so the job kept being put off.

The header nobody could edit

The header is the first thing every visitor sees, on every page, and here it shows a logo the clinic no longer uses anywhere else.

A patient who has seen the new sign from the parking lot, or the card a doctor handed them, arrives at a page that does not match. The mismatch is small and immediate.

The banner has other costs. Search engines and screen readers cannot read words that are part of a picture, and on phones the whole banner shrinks until the tagline and phone number are too small to read.

The current logo, at the bottom

The only place the real logo appears is the footer, where fewer visitors scroll and nobody looks for the clinic's identity.

Worse, it puts the inconsistency on display. A visitor who reaches the bottom of the page now has two logos to compare, and the header loses.

Footers are easy to edit in most themes, which is exactly why this one changed first. The easiest place to update was the least important one.

A booking page that looks like another business

The booking service runs on its own web address with its own layout. The clinic's only branding there is an uploaded logo and a colour setting.

Both were set up years ago by a former office manager: an early draft of the new logo, the old teal, and a page title with a shortened version of the clinic's name.

So a patient who has just seen a teal logo at the top of the site and a navy one at the bottom clicks book now, and lands on a page in a third style at an unfamiliar address.

That is the moment of commitment. Some finish anyway, some phone to check the page is genuine, and some leave the booking for later and never come back.

A worked example

The clinic's front desk noticed the pattern before anyone looked at the website: new patients phoning to ask whether the online booking page was really the clinic's.

The designer who created the new logo supplied final files in the sizes the web needed, including a square version for small spaces.

The header banner was replaced with the logo as its own image and the clinic's name, phone number and tagline as real text, which stays readable on a phone.

In the booking service's settings, the logo, colour and name were updated to match, and the book now buttons gained a line saying booking continues on the clinic's secure booking page.

Three smaller copies were checked the same week, since each kept its own file: the browser tab icon, the listing photographs on Google My Business, and the preview picture Facebook shows for shared pages.

Choosing the one to keep

The right logo is usually obvious: the one on the sign and the printed material, since those are the most expensive to change.

Where it is not obvious, decide before touching the site. Replacing three logos with a fourth, chosen in a hurry, repeats the problem.

Someone owns the logo

The pattern repeats unless one person is responsible for how the clinic looks online. Not designing it, just checking it.

Any change to the website header, the booking settings, the listing photographs or the social profiles goes past that person, who compares it with the sign. It takes a minute each time.

The counter-case within the site

Not every variation is a problem. A simplified mark in the browser tab, or a single-colour version on a dark footer, is the same logo used sensibly, and patients read it that way.

A booking service will always look somewhat different from the main site, which is acceptable as long as the name, logo and colours clearly match.

And a clinic with a strong local reputation will lose fewer patients to the mismatch than a new one, though it still pays in phone calls.

One logo, in its proper versions, everywhere a patient might meet the clinic, with the booking page matching the site.

What to change

1. Decide which logo is current, using the sign.
2. Get proper files from the designer.
3. Replace the header banner with a logo and real text.
4. Update the booking page logo, colour and name.
5. Tell patients where the booking link leads.
6. Check the tab icon, listing and sharing images.
7. Name one person to check every change.

Step four matters most, because the booking page is where a patient decides whether to hand over personal details. A mismatch anywhere else costs a little trust; there, it costs the booking.

Another site let down by a service it does not control is a restaurant site whose hours are in a Facebook widget.

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