International Cancer Specialists
International Cancer Specialists treats patients from over 40 countries, but its website broke whenever someone edited a sentence. We moved it to WordPress, rebuilt the layouts and made the design reusable for regional sites.
ICS now runs its patient-facing site on WordPress, edits it in-house, and uses the same design framework for a sister site in Indonesia.
What we were solving
International Cancer Specialists (ICS) is a private oncology clinic in Singapore's Paragon medical centre. It has treated outpatients since 2008, runs cancer-focused health screening, and sees patients from over 40 countries.
The website carried a lot of weight. Brochures and clinic banners pointed to it by QR code. Doctors shared their profile pages when meeting referring partners. Overseas patients compared ICS against regional providers before picking up the phone.
The site wasn't up to it. It wasn't on WordPress, and one copy change in a text box could scramble the layout on that page and others. Hover menus sent visitors straight past the service overview pages. The two screening packages sat one above the other, so nobody saw both at a glance. The design used red, which clashed with the pink, gold and black logo, and no two pages shared the same components.
ICS also wanted a design it could copy for sister sites in Indonesia and Vietnam.
How we tackled it
Migration first, redesign where the content needed it
ICS liked its content and its pages. We kept all of them. The job was to move the site onto WordPress with Beaver Builder, then rework the layouts for consistency rather than start from a blank page. We ran a discovery call, a questionnaire and a design strategy call to settle the user flow, then built a style guide around Lato, the logo's pink and the navy already on the site. Red went. Standard components replaced the one-off boxes, so an edit to a paragraph could no longer move anything else.
Built around how a patient reads a clinic site
Singapore's medical advertising rules bar laudatory language, so the design had to earn trust without saying "best". We put doctor and director profiles, insurer logos and patient testimonials where comparison-minded visitors would look for them. Services got proper overview pages that the menu actually leads to. Screening packages sit side by side. A news ticker under the header carries announcements, and an Events and News section was added mid-build when ICS asked for it.
One framework, several countries
The regional switcher in the navigation isn't a translation plugin. It's a dropdown that sends visitors to a separate site for each country, starting with icscancer.co.id, with Vietnam planned. We built the Singapore site so the theme, components and page templates could be duplicated to a new domain and localised, instead of each country site being rebuilt from scratch. Before launch we loaded video manuals into the WordPress admin and ran a live training session for the marketing team.
What we delivered
ICS now runs its website on WordPress, hosted on its own account, and the marketing team publishes news, events and blog posts without calling us. The site went live on 20 April 2023. Three years on it still runs the same build: the news ticker carries the clinic's current announcements and the switcher points to the Indonesian site. The pages a patient uses to decide (doctor profiles, screening packages, insurer list, contact details) are where the questionnaire said they should be.
What we learned
A migration is a redesign with a safety rail. ICS knew exactly what wasn't working (fragile boxes, a hover menu that skipped pages, a stray colour) and knew its content was right. Keeping the pages and fixing the structure got a better result than a blank-sheet design would have, and the client could review it against a site they already understood.
Regulated industries also need a design that does the persuading. When the copy can't say "leading", the layout, the profiles and the proof have to.
