Yes Dental is a new dental clinic based in Setia Alam, Malaysia. Prominently known as a female-owned establishment. The purpose of the project was to create a website that followed the styling guidelines, ease-of-use and trust-worthiness to customers when visited. The targeted audience were families living in the city of Setia Alam and Shah Alam that needed high quality and affordable dental treatment.

Challenges & Requirements

The biggest initial challenge for us was how do we serve our client (Yes Dental) when we're based in the other side of the world. Not only that, how do we also serve our client's customers when we inherently do not have full expertise in the geography and the culture of Malaysia.

Our requirements were therefore unique, see the following list:

• A stunning frontend that meets the styling guidelines set by our client.
• A backend that loads incredibly fast for customers based in Malaysia.
• A backend CMS system and hosting that loads as fast as the frontend.
• Excellent copywriting that captivates, great for SEO and is understandable for customers based in Malaysia.
• A website that performs better than the competitors in the area.
• A website that has live updates on promotions.

Planning & Strategy

Our client had a list of websites that they were inspired by and we used it as the basis of our research for the design of the website. We also did an extensive analysis of our client's competitors and reviewed their website, auditing it and creating a strategy to give our own site the edge. The analysis concluded that most of Yes Dental's competitor website were confusing to navigate; especially on mobile devices. They had too many transitions, animations, and blindspots from CTA buttons.

We understood from our client brief that the majority of our client's customers are families and individuals who live in a short commute of the building. Knowing that Malaysia is a mobile and car-centric country; we opted to prioritise a mobile-first website that has a clear section to navigate to the business. We want a website that is modular for future expansion.

As mentioned prior, the biggest challenge was dealing with a different culture and geography. This meant a careful analysis and planning of keywords and SEO practices. Thankfully, the second official language in Malaysia is English, so translating would not be as high a priority as other International brands, which would bring with it many new challenges regarding keywords and, frankly, the translation process as a whole. Considering the focus for Yes Dental was around high quality and affordable dental treatment, these keywords were used as often as possible. The target audience for Yes Dental was for families, so there a lot of keywords were focused around parents searching for dentists and treatments suitable for their children and how family friendly the business is. Finally, the secondary target audience was for people living in a short commute from the building, so there was a strong focus on geographic keywords to target locals and residents of Setia Alam and Shah Alam.

Additionally, we had to make sure that much of the wording of banners and headers was in the theme of Yes Dental, i.e. "Say YES to a perfect set of teeth". This would keep the brand voice consistent across the site and make the brand name especially prominent and memorable.

The technology stack we chose was Next.js with Directus and PostgreSQL. "I believe that Next.js was a no-brainer choice given our past experiences using the fullstack framework and how it utilises pre-rendering techniques for speedy load times. Directus is open sourced and is easy to use, especially for clients." - Nirutt Anstee. We developed the frontpage to dynamically render promotions displayed as a top bar. Whenever our client posted a promotion, it dynamically was fetched for visitors.

Initial sitemap of Yes Dental website.

Design & Development Process

The goals for customers visiting Yes Dental's website are prioritised as; to book an appointment, find the location and read more into the dental practise. It is the foundation of our wireframe and web development for this site. Our client had a unique color scheme, typography and branding. To keep it consistent with our client's requirement we based the entire website on three main colours; dark green, green and cream that were used interchangeably. For each section of the website we have a wave separator. "Initially I thought that it was a fantastic concept especially when most of our client's instagram posts had it. It ended as one of the biggest challenge to add due to SVG sizability." - Nirutt Anstee. Dynamic metadata has been implemented on every page of the site accessible for Google to detect. We have opted to open a server nearer to our client to reliably serve users with consistent and fast loading times.

Styleguide of Yes Dental website.

Feedback & Quality Assurance

There were multiple rounds of user feedback and implementation; mainly tweaking the initial design ever so slightly. The performance of the website under development indicated that the website would be fast given there weren't any substantial issues during the optimisation phase. Nonetheless we extensively tested the website for its responsiveness, compatibility on different browsers and devices, under simulated traffic load, security, accessibility and compliance.

Wireframe of Yes Dental website.

The Services page (a list of dental treatments that Yes Dental provides) needed some additions and adjustments after the client had seen them though they were still largely satisfied with them initially. We had done most of this content work from scratch and had to do our own research into these dental practices so we were unsurprised that there would have been changes. Once the client had read through, some adjustments needed to be made to certain listed services, i.e. corrections on services they didn't provide exactly what we had described and needed some specific corrections which we couldn't have known straight from the off, and also there were some additions added later by the client that were given content as soon as possible.

Results

Our client was satisfied with the communication, design and development of the website. The website was developed with the correct requirements to be mobile-first as at least 60% of visitors were from a mobile device. The website took on average of 1.29 seconds to load globally with reports of load times to be even faster in Malaysia. So far, without additional marketing packages, the site is averaging 55 unique visitors per week. The website is also ranked first for "Family Dental Clinic" for customers in Setia Alam in the second week of being launched, proving the success of our SEO research and techniques.

Yes Dental website statistics recorded on 23rd March 2025.

Summarising our entire process from start to finish, the website design and development overall went smoothly. Our project requirements were well-planned with research into the Malaysian market being adequate. The website is fast and responsive. However, this doesn't mean that we can't identify areas for improvement. One of the most difficult part for the team was communicating over timezones. "I'd usually have meetings with our client at 5 o' clock in the morning which was a challenge in itself. Though I do appreciate the experience to help a new business grow on the other side of the world, no less" - Nirutt Anstee.

In terms of SEO and content, while we are largely happy with the results of the ranking we have received, the research conducted will only service the client for the opening few months. While some keywords are fine, we will need to be monitoring this constantly, and we may start to encounter more issues with it being an International company. Currently it's all about particularly careful research: "Working on a local business, or even just a business in the U.K., allows us to use our own knowledge of the area, colloquialisms, idioms, and more. We just need to work and communicate with the client and hope that they can bridge the gap for us where necessary, though we plan to do as much as possible to assist Yes Dental." - Joe Hance

We are maintaining and updating Yes Dental's website for the foreseeable future. The website has been built modularly and can be updated to support multiple locations, additional sections and further enhancements.