A Privacy-First Website for a New York Therapy Practice

The Client

Sanja Medich is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and the founder of Therapy Journey, with over 30 years of clinical experience. She trained in Belgrade, Arizona, and New York and has practiced in New York City for 20 years, working with professionals, executives, and individuals who are ready to do serious, meaningful work on themselves.

Her website served to help someone who is looking for support understand how she works and feel comfortable reaching out.

For a therapist, that first visit to the website is already part of the relationship. People arrive in a vulnerable moment, and the site has to earn their trust before they ever fill out a form.

The Challenge

The practice had outgrown its web presence in three ways.

• An outdated website. Her existing site no longer reflected the practice or how clients browse today.
• Legacy hosting. Her site was hosted on a Network Solutions hosting package, which lacked modern design tools making it difficult to update.
• No professional email active. She was corresponding with her current clients through a personal email account instead of an address on her practice's own domain.

Once the new site was live, a fourth issue appeared: automated bots began submitting junk through the contact form.

What EVM Did

1. Designed and built a new site in Webflow. EVM created a focused, single-page site that walks a visitor from who Sanja is, through her services, to a contact form. It is fully responsive, carries the practice's logo and branding, and has clean search basics in place: page title, description and an auto-generated sitemap.

2. Moved hosting from Network Solutions to Webflow. EVM set Sanja up with her own Webflow account, transferred the finished site into it so she owns it outright, and repointed the domain to Webflow with a secure HTTPS connection. The domain registration stayed where it was; only the hosting moved. Design and hosting are now both provided in one place.

3. Set up professional email in Google Workspace. EVM verified the domain with Google, configured mail delivery, and created a practice mailbox at therapyjourney.com. Contact form messages are now sent directly to that inbox, and the address on the site matches the practice's name.

4. Blocked the bots. EVM added Google reCAPTCHA to the contact form, which stopped the automated spam while leaving the form quick and easy for real people. A live test confirmed genuine inquiries still came through.

A Deliberate Choice: No GA4

EVM is a marketing analytics firm, and installing Google Analytics 4 is usually the first order of business with a new client. Here I recommended against it.

When I sat down with Sanja to plan the GA4 installation, she raised a concern: people visiting a therapist's website are often doing so privately, and she did not want their visits tracked. I agreed. A visit to a mental health site is sensitive in itself, and no traffic report is worth making a prospective client feel observed.

So the site runs with no analytics tags and no behavioral tracking. To keep an eye on search visibility, EVM set up Google Search Console instead, which reports how the site appears in Google results in aggregate and places nothing on the site that follows visitors.

The lesson: good measurement starts with deciding what should be measured and what should not be measured.

The Outcome

Therapy Journey now has a modern, secure site that Sanja owns and controls, on a single platform.

• One home for the site. Design, content and hosting sit together in Webflow, under Sanja's own account.
• A professional identity. Email and website share the practice's domain.
• A clean inbox. Contact form spam stopped once bot protection went live.
• Privacy intact. Visitors can read about the practice without being tracked.
• Room to change/grow. EVM provided Sanja with an instructional video so she can edit text and swap images herself.

"My old website was out of date. Deborah handled everything, from the new site to the hosting to my email, and explained each step in plain language. What made the difference was how personal it was. It felt like going to a high-end tailor, where the measurements were made just for me. When I said my clients' privacy comes first, she listened and built the site around that. I have a website I'm proud of and nothing on it that makes me uneasy." — Sanja Medich, Licensed Mental Health Counselor and founder, Therapy Journey