project details


American Pathology Partners

American Pathology Partners is a privately held medical laboratory company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The company operates a nationwide network of pathology laboratories focused on local and regional healthcare. During this project, we provided an invaluable asset to the client in terms of a completed, live website. However, much of the value was earned through strategy and wireframing with special attention to user experience for their three target user types, as well as for their own personnel.

At Nice Branding Agency, we really enjoyed working on the American Pathology Partners medical website development project. During these larger website builds, we’re able to really exercise our strategic capabilities and make an impact for a company through the design and development process.

As a branding agency that handles both website development and website design in house, we were able to seamlessly create a website that used strategy to implement a simple user experience for all who encountered the website.


AP2 retained Nice Branding Agency after being referred by another medical industry client of ours. After seeing the result of the medical website development project we completed for our client, American Pathology Partners, or AP2, approached us with their need.

The AP2 executive leadership team was tasked with restructuring and redesigning the company’s website. They conveyed to us that they wanted their new website to be as highly functional, well designed and easy to use as the one they had seen.

However, during discovery, we found that the website for AP2 would me a much more complex project. The goal would not just be to create a mobile-responsive, aesthetically-pleasing website, but to simplify the user experience for internal and external users on the surface level of the site and in the backend.

As a privately held medical laboratory company, the organization operates multiple locations. Each of these lab location has it’s own company name, brand, and URL. However, they are all apart of AP2. Each of the labs throughout the United States serves its own patients, employs its own physicians and has its own internal structures for billing, patient results, services, and more.

Additionally, AP2 serves physician offices, hospitals and surgery centers with specialized anatomic and pathology services, and so they also send bills to patients directly.

Our strategy session mapped out the user experience for each of these targets, taking into consideration ease of use for patients, physicians, and the AP2 team. This involved ensuring that information was readily accessible to each of the targets on demand, and that the user journey throughout the website for each of the targets would make sense to that person. Additionally, Advanced Custom Fields were employed to create a backend Content Management System that would allow the administrators at AP2 to easily update much of the content themselves in WordPress.


Post-discovery, we created a sitemap to ensure that all pages would be accounted for in the medical website development project. The sitemap allows the client to visually assess the scope of the project, while giving our team an opportunity to confirm that nothing has slipped through the cracks. This sitemap aided us in mapping out page hierarchy with special attention to the For Patients and For Physician sections, as well as the local lab pages.


At this juncture, we also talked to the AP2 team about hosting their website. Our hosting platform is the most robust in the industry and ensures fast page load speeds, security from hackers, and daily backups. Additionally, our team physically updates the platform and plugins monthly to keep the website in tip top shape. This is something that your standard inexpensive hosting services don’t handle, and something that’s required for a website to continue to operate at optimal performance.

At the time, the AP2 team decided to host the website themselves. They have since transferred the website back to our hosting platform for ease of maintenance and website security.


With the sitemap in place and the discovery period behind us, we set out to structure the website. We created first a comprehensive set of website wireframes to provide the client and our team a working blueprint of the website.


Then, looking at the site from the user’s point of view, we planned out how the website would function as a seamless flow of pages. We made navigation and ease of use our first priority without forgetting the aesthetic appeal of the site that was key to AP2’s credibility with patients.

An icon system was created and implemented to allow viewers to easily identify services. Imagery was implemented throughout the website to not only convey a professional, medical appearance, but also to highlight the company’s impact on a person’s ability to live a happy, health life. This aesthetic humanizes the lab company website, and allows people to connect with the brand.


Upon completion of our website design phase, we presented the design of key pages to our client for review and approval. After making a few design changes to the website to ensure that the imagery was exactly how the client wanted to portray their individual labs, we moved the assets into development.

The AP2 medical website development project included the build of a custom WordPress website. We utilized Advanced Custom Fields to ensure that almost all of the content was manageable from the backend. We also developed the website to be SEO ready, with clean code, proper heading structure, image tagging, meta descriptions, and more.

When the website development was complete, we presented the client with a staged link that they could use to access the website before it would go live on their domain.


When the final staged site was approved, we launched the website on their existing domain, replacing the former website. Typically, if a client is not hosting with us, we provide the site files and the client will launch the website themselves. However, in this case, we were on call to launch the website for them.


Overall, we designed this website to be a trustworthy-looking embodiment of the AP2 brand so patients knew that the AP2 website was a legitimate place they could access the portal to pay their bills.

Then we developed an online database for providers as an online source for downloading forms, ordering supplies, and accessing a directory of providers. Finally, we simplified the existing backend and populated the site’s content and images.

To closeout the project, we provided a training video equipping the AP2 team to make updates to key content on the website themselves. This included forms, team info and headshots, and more.

Your business deserves a website that is well-designed, mobile friendly, and easy to update. Many sites that were built even just a few years ago are no longer in line with recent web trends and are not taking advantage of advances in user experience that will make marketing your services simple. If you are wondering whether your business is in need of a new website, contact us today.

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