Working
with WARDORX.

We were changing our name, and we wanted a website built around the business as it is now.

Our work started in 2016 as an independent mobile ultrasound service in Calgary. Today Spectrum also covers specialist interpretation and reporting, education and mentorship, equipment and applications support through our collaboration with Northern Diagnostics, and additional diagnostics. Our email and web address still carry the Spectrum Ultrasound name, but the business operates as Spectrum Veterinary Imaging.

We also knew what the new site had to do:

• Explain what Spectrum does, and where and how the service is delivered.
• Give veterinarians an easy route to refer a patient.
• Link properly to Northern Diagnostics and our specialist services.
• Give pet owners somewhere credible to look us up after their veterinarian refers them.

WARDORX is a web development company that builds fast websites and focuses on local search.

We talked at the start of September and decided on the 5th. Before we agreed to anything, we asked what WARDORX would do differently from other web companies and how that would help us. We asked about monthly charges, about our domain and about moving our email. The answers came back in writing, usually within the hour.

On 4 September, our founder wrote that WARDORX’s honesty and openness meant a lot to him.

The build was a one-time charge, set out in the agreement.

We asked about price on the afternoon of 4 September and had an answer the same afternoon. Our founder’s reply was that the pricing was “very reasonable”. The agreement also ruled out surprise fees for a phone call. WARDORX doesn’t charge us monthly for the website, and revisions and changes to pages are included.

Running the site costs very little, because there is very little to pay for. The site doesn’t use a content management system, so there are no plugins to license or keep updated, no theme subscription and no page builder. The pages are plain, fast and hosted on Cloudflare.

Photography would be billed separately, and only for a photographer’s hours, if we ever need new photos taken. We also asked whether we could bring in another developer one day without licensing problems. The answer was yes.

The most detailed parts of our brief were two emails, sent on 15 and 16 September, about wording and order more than looks.

The first set out what the home page should say, in order. Advanced ultrasound came first, then why practices use Spectrum, education, equipment, additional diagnostics, what the service means for pet owners and the referral portal. The second listed every menu and dropdown.

• Replace “locum” with “On-Site & Regional Ultrasound Services”, so Spectrum doesn’t sound like a temporary staffing service.
• Say “Spectrum”, “our services” and “our specialist partners”, and use our founder’s name sparingly. We didn’t want the site to feel like one person’s ultrasound business.
• Present ultrasound as advanced, rigorous and specialist-supported, rather than as a mobile ultrasound service.
• Give practices a clear route into the Timeless Veterinary Community referral portal, and don’t send the public there.
• Put a highlighted button at the far right of the menu. Our first suggestion was “Refer a Patient”, and five minutes later a second email changed the name to “Veterinary Referrals”.

All five requests are on the site as we asked.

Sixteen days, from the agreement arriving on 7 September to the site going live on 23 September.

Within a week there was a 14-page draft to review. By the evening of 17 September the site had been rebuilt around our two emails and had grown to 29 pages. In the ten days up to launch the site was updated about twenty times.

Most of what we asked for was live the same day. On the morning of 18 September our founder went through the site and sent back a list. The logo was our old one, the site was “a little bit boring” and “very white”, and the home page needed to be clearer about who reports our abdominal studies. By the end of the morning the site had a new logo, warmer colours, rotating clinical images, sections that fade in and corrected wording.

Later that day we asked for a new home page photograph and sent our founder’s biography and updated credentials. Both went live that day. We sent our referral portal’s address on the evening of 20 September, and the buttons pointed to the portal by the next morning.

Changes have come just as quickly since the site went live.

• We said the referral button was “one step too many” away from the portal. Within a day, the button on every page opened the portal sign-in directly.
• New clinical images we sent on 25 September were cropped, captioned and on the site that afternoon.
• When we pointed out near-duplicate images on 26 September, they came down the same day.
• Five video loops we shared through Google Drive on 27 September were cropped and on the site by the 30th.

Before we signed, we told WARDORX we didn’t want to spend hours searching for images, deciding what went where and doing the layout ourselves. We didn’t have to.

By mid-September we had sent somewhere between fifteen and twenty photographs, spread across texts and emails. In our founder’s words at the time, the photos were “likely a big cluster of text and emails”. WARDORX sorted through the photos, matched each to the right page, wrote the captions and descriptions, and only asked us about images that couldn’t be placed with confidence.

Our part was the material only we could supply: the wording for our services, our founder’s biography and credentials, the address of the referral portal and images from our own studies. Reviewing a change usually meant opening the site, looking at the page and replying with a sentence or two.

Several things on this site were done without our asking.

Our scan exports carry a banner across the top with the owner’s surname, the patient’s name, an accession number and the exact time of the study. WARDORX cropped the banner off every image and video before anything went on the site, then searched the finished site for every patient and client name in the files.

When an abbreviation on one of our scans wasn’t clear, WARDORX asked what the abbreviation meant instead of guessing. Our credentials were published exactly as we sent them, not expanded by guesswork. Details we hadn’t confirmed, such as a street address, were left off rather than filled in.

WARDORX also tested things we wouldn’t have known to ask about: text contrast on every page, the layout on fourteen screen sizes from a small phone to a 2K desktop monitor, and loading on a slow connection. Video loops don’t start on their own when a visitor’s phone is in data-saver mode or set to reduce motion.

The people we most needed this site to work for are the veterinary teams who send us cases.

• A Veterinary Referrals button on every page that opens the Timeless Veterinary Community sign-in directly. Practices send imaging requests and receive specialist reports through that portal.
• A page on how to get set up for referrals, for practices without a portal login yet.
• Service pages explaining how each study is acquired, and who interprets and reports each one.
• Our phone number and email on every page, and on phones a call button that stays on screen.
• A contact guide that turns a few fields into an email draft on the visitor’s own device. Nothing typed into the guide is sent to a website server.
• A separate page for pet owners that sends them back to their own veterinarian, who arranges the referral.

The plainest record of how the project went is what we wrote to WARDORX while it was happening.

On 18 September, after going through the rebuilt site that morning, our founder wrote:

“The layout looks fantastic and the text and headers are the big parts and they look fantastic as well.”

The same note called the site flow “very nice”, before asking for more colour. Just after launch, his message about the last two changes included this line:

“Thank you for your diligent and hard work here.”

Settle your name and your wording before anything else.

We went back and forth between Spectrum Veterinary Ultrasound and Spectrum Veterinary Imaging, and our logo was replaced and resized twice in one day. Deciding earlier would have saved a round of changes.

Write down the order you want things in. Our two emails about the home page and the menus shaped this site more than anything else we sent.

Put your photographs in one shared folder from the start. Ours arrived across texts, emails and a Google Drive share.

Check your scan exports for patient details. Every one of ours had a banner across the top with names and an accession number.

Decide where referrals should go before the build starts. We changed where our referral buttons pointed twice, once before launch and once after.

Yes.

We needed a website that was accurate about clinical work, quick for veterinary teams to use and ready in weeks rather than months. We got all three at a price we were comfortable with, and changes since launch have been just as quick. If you run a clinic or a specialist service and need a new website, WARDORX is who we would send you to.