Hilltop Foot Care

The brief

Julie Ford has practised foot health in Nuneaton since 2010: a small clinic on Coventry Road, one practitioner, no receptionist. That’s the appeal — unhurried appointments and no waiting room full of strangers. It’s also the constraint. Every phone call arrives while she’s with a patient, and every missed call is a booking that goes to whoever answers theirs.

So the site had two jobs pulling in opposite directions. It had to feel like the clinic — calm, personal, plainly priced — and it had to take bookings on its own, at any hour, without ever double-booking the one person doing the treatments.

The details

The hard part of a one-practitioner diary is that a double booking isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a patient standing outside a locked door. So availability is calculated rather than stored — opening hours minus closures minus live appointments, on a 15-minute grid with 24 hours’ notice — and the database itself refuses overlapping appointments outright. Two people booking the same slot in the same second ends with one booking and one honest error message, not two patients at 10am.

Card bookings hold their slot for 15 minutes while checkout runs, then release it automatically if the payment never lands, so an abandoned Stripe page can’t quietly block a Tuesday morning forever.

The admin panel matters more than the website. Julie runs the whole clinic from it — prices, hours, holidays, phone bookings taken between patients — and none of it needs us. Patient data is locked down to match: the tables are reachable only by the clinic’s own accounts, and the public site touches them through its own server routes, never from the browser.

The outcome

The site launched in August 2026 with online booking, card payment, and the admin panel live from day one — the clinic now takes appointments outside opening hours without anyone answering the phone.