Center City Dermatology
Center City Dermatology is a dermatology and skin cancer practice with offices in Philadelphia, Exton and West Grove, Pennsylvania. A new site so a patient finds the right office, the treatment they heard about, and a way to ask for an appointment without calling.
Where it started
Dr. Stephen Hess runs a practice that has looked after Philadelphia’s skin since 2008, and patients trust it once they are in the room. The website was the room before that one, and it had fallen behind. He wanted it modern, simple and reliable, useful to a patient on the day they need it, and able to take on more later.
- Type
- Practice site
- Scope
- Discovery, strategy, copy, design, build
- Offices
- Three: Philadelphia, Exton, West Grove
- Serving Philadelphia since
- 2008
- Launched
- October 2026
- Form requests, first month
- About 90
- Status
- Live
What we heard
Patients could not tell which office was theirs, and the only way in was the phone.
Discovery started on the patient’s side of the screen. Addresses and phone numbers changed from page to page, and the footer listed only one office. GentleCure, a non-surgical skin cancer treatment the practice delivers in-house, was hard to find on the site. People searched for the treatment, found the practice, and still asked whether it was really offered. Our audit added broken service links and provider pages that were out of date, the kind of detail a new patient notices before meeting anyone.
What we decided · 01 of 04
Make the offices impossible to confuse.
Each office has its own address, phone, hours and directions, shown the same way on every page, and the request form lets a patient choose one.
What we decided · 02 of 04
Put GentleCure on the front page.
Patients were already asking the question, so the first screen answers it before they have to, and a page of its own explains the treatment in plain words.
What we decided · 03 of 04
Add an appointment request form that works at any hour.
It asks for a few lines, not a medical history, and says plainly that staff will follow up. It is a request, not a booking, so no one is promised a time the schedule cannot keep.
What we decided · 04 of 04
Keep services short, grouped the way patients think about them.
Medical, cosmetic, aesthetic and specialty, with enough to reassure and one clear next step.
The first launch stayed focused on those four. Online scheduling, digital intake and payments were mapped in discovery and set aside for later phases, so the site could ship complete and on time.
What shipped
Five parts, each with one job.
Home, leading with GentleCure. About, with every provider current. Services, short and grouped, with the advanced treatments in their own section. Patient resources, with the new-patient form ready to download and fill in before the visit. Contact, with the three offices side by side and the request form.
Who made it
A collaboration with Vladimir Ermant. Apex Mono led the project from discovery through launch, wrote the copy and the sitemap, and worked alongside him on the design and the build.
What happened
Patients used the request form from day one.
The first appointment request through the form arrived the day after launch. Twenty-five came in the first week. By the end of October, nearly ninety. Before the new site there was no form, so every one of these would have been a phone call or nothing. They are requests, not confirmed appointments. What they show is a need that was there all along: patients wanted a way to ask without calling, and used it the moment it existed. Dr. Hess and the team loved the finished site.
Next
All work
04Near Me Derm.
Practice site
Design, build, upkeep