Website for a paediatric cardiology practice in Heidelberg

A new website for a paediatric cardiology practice in Heidelberg

In their joint practice on the Kurfürsten-Anlage, Dr Sabine Born and Dr Julia Winter care for children and young people with heart conditions. Their old website was over 15 years old. For the new one, everything was down to me: design, photos, tech and moving the domain.

Anyone who lands here usually has a referral letter in hand and a bit of a knot in their stomach. That’s why the site answers the practical questions first: how do I get an appointment, when can I reach the practice, where do I park, what should I bring?

Friendly, without promising too much

The practice’s logo is a child’s drawing that hangs framed on the wall there: a little figure with a big red heart. Then there’s the warm orange of the rooms, terracotta, sand and cream. The wooden fish from the waiting room swim through the sections as small animated fish, in muted red, green and blue. If you’ve set your device to reduce motion, they stay still.

For all its friendliness, the site shouldn’t promise anything a doctor’s practice can’t deliver. So it shows what the practice looks like and explains honestly how an appointment works.

Practice photos and portraits from one source

The pictures are mine too: the rooms and lots of little details, photographed in the practice at the end of June 2026, plus portraits of the two doctors and the practice team. Right at the top, the wooden fish sit out of focus behind the text, and the gallery shows parents, even before their first appointment, that a friendly place awaits them. The whole series is under Photography.

Contact form without a server: protecting patient data

Through the site, parents register their child, cancel appointments and request prescriptions. That’s health data, and it shouldn’t end up anywhere it doesn’t belong. That’s why the forms don’t send anything to a server: right in the browser, the entries are turned into a ready-to-send email that opens in the parents’ own email app. They send it themselves and simply attach the referral, and anyone who uses email in the browser can copy the text with one click.

No form service, no sending via third parties, and two sentences under the button explain why.

No cookies and no tracking

In every other respect, too, the site is as privacy-friendly as it gets: no cookies, no tracking, and the font comes from the practice’s own domain. Google Maps only loads when someone taps ‘Load map’, and every visit starts without the map again. Only views per page are counted, with no IP address and no identifier. I checked the privacy policy against the code, section by section.

Live since September 2026

I built the site with Astro from July 2026, and after three rounds of feedback with the practice it went live on 30 September. The pages sit ready-built on Cloudflare; when the domain moved, the practice’s emails stayed where they were, and old URLs redirect to the right place on the new site.

If the practice is closed, a notice appears at the top indicating who is covering for them; this disappears automatically after the last day. And the team sends any requests for changes directly to us via their own client portal.