Abien Psicología.

Abien Psicología is the practice of Álvaro Bueno, a licensed health psychologist and EMDR therapist in Valencia (Spain). It offers in-person and online individual therapy, couples therapy and group workshops for teenagers, young people and adults dealing with anxiety, depression, self-esteem or trauma.

The starting point was a website made with a generic builder, on another domain, plus loose processes: workshop sign-ups went to Google Forms, outside the practice's tools, and the contact form never confirmed to visitors that their message had arrived. I owned the project end to end: product, design, development, SEO and analytics.

Whoever lands on a psychologist's website is often going through a hard time, reads on a phone and hesitates to take the step. The goal was not to impress, but to turn that hesitation into a first contact: visitors should feel understood before they write.

Three requirements came on top: a bilingual site (Spanish and English), a practice able to edit its team, specialties, workshops and blog without a developer, and a domain change that wouldn't throw away the rankings the old site already had.

I worked with spec-driven development: a PRD, recorded architecture decisions and every feature as a specified change before writing code. Before any code there was a clickable prototype with 25 approved screens, which later became a safety net: visual tests compare the site against that prototype so the design doesn't degrade between iterations.

The information architecture follows how someone who needs help actually searches: by format (in-person, online, workshops) and by what is happening to them (anxiety, depression, self-esteem, trauma, PTSD, couples). Each specialty has its own page, with a story that explains it in plain language and a single next step: booking the first session.

Calm before conversion. The homepage is a public-domain Monet painting (Wisteria blended with the Water Lilies) rendered in WebGL that visitors can “stir” with a finger or the pointer. Each specialty has its own living painting: a shader that blends a dramatic and a luminous version of the same work. It is the only moment of motion on each page; with reduced motion a static version is served, and text contrast over the paintings was measured pixel by pixel.

A restrained palette: the logo's teal over an almost-white background, Comfortaa for headings (its round strokes echo the logotype) and Satoshi for body text. Neither clinical nor spa kitsch: space, type and the paintings do the work, and the voice speaks informally, with no emojis.

One clear next step on every page: booking through Doctoralia, WhatsApp or a custom form with confirmation email, honeypot and a per-IP rate limit. Workshop sign-ups moved from Google Forms to a native flow, with the data inside the practice and exportable to CSV.

Health-website privacy: the cookie banner separates analytics, marketing and embedded content and loads nothing non-essential without consent. GA4 and the Meta pixel only measure page views, and I ruled out Microsoft Clarity because its terms exclude health data.

The site is live at abienpsicologia.com, in Spanish and English, with the old site's URLs redirected to keep rankings, structured data for the psychology practice and the licensed professional, a sitemap with hreflang and a verified Search Console.

The practice edits its content from its own passwordless panel (a six-digit code by email): the “About us” blocks, specialties, workshops with sign-up downloads and the blog, all with Spanish and English tabs.

In the launch measurement (mobile Lighthouse, 26 September 2026) the production build scored 100 in accessibility, best practices and SEO, and the preview between 91 and 96 in performance. That measurement predates the current WebGL homepage: the next one will tell how much the living painting costs.

On a mental-health website, conversion is won by slowing down: fewer stimuli, a warm voice and a single clear step per page work better than any commercial urgency.

An approved prototype is worth twice as much once it becomes a test. And documents age: the PRD assumed there was no old site to redirect, and it was the pre-launch SEO study that found it in time.