The Weight Loss Medics. From a blank page to two countries.

In April 2024 an IT partner we’ve worked with for years introduced us to Dr Andrew Kernohan and Dr David McGrane, Consultant Endocrinologists in Glasgow. They wanted to see patients by video anywhere in the UK, and for patients to book and pay online. They had no name, no domain and no brand.

The market was crowded. Online pharmacies and supermarket “online doctors” filled the search results, most of them selling medicine after a questionnaire and a sign-off. The doctors were offering something different, a proper consultation with a specialist first, and the website had to make that difference obvious.

• A name, a web address and an identity
• Online booking and payment, with consultations by video
• Clinical records kept off the website altogether
• A website that sells the consultation, not the medicine, within the advertising rules

We suggested The Weight Loss Medics, at theweightlossmedics.co.uk. It says exactly what the practice does. “Medics” tells people they’re dealing with qualified doctors who can prescribe, not an information site or a shop. “The” makes it sound definitive, and .co.uk says it’s a UK service.

The doctors agreed the same day and registered the domain that evening.

The brief was bright and approachable: something that would stand apart from the online pharmacies, suit men and women alike and stay clear of the usual weight-loss clichés, with no tape measures round waists and no obvious stock photography.

The logo, agreed in June 2024, is built around a hand-drawn W. A cyan ribbon sweeps up from it and a pink one runs under the name like an underline. The W works on its own as the website icon, and the ribbons carry through into backgrounds, borders and print.

We recommended keeping clinical records out of the website altogether. Booking, payment, the medical questionnaire and the video consultation all run in WriteUpp, a clinical system built for practices, and the website links to it.

That let the practice open before its website did. The booking pages went live in July 2024, the first appointment was booked and paid for on 25 July, and the website followed in August.

How a patient gets from the website to a consultation, and what follows.

People who check their BMI and leave an email address get a short series of emails over the next few days, with videos from the doctors about the service, the treatments and safety.

Our competitor research in 2024 found that none of the big online services let you hear from a clinician. So the doctors filmed short pieces to camera on their phones and webcams, with our notes on light, framing and sound, and we edited them: cleaned up the audio, graded the picture, and added music, the logo and captions for anyone watching with the sound off.

Dr Kernohan’s one-minute introduction has led the homepage ever since, and Dr McGrane’s film on how the service works became one of the most visited pages from Google in 2025. On the new sites, a video only loads when someone presses play, so nothing from Vimeo or YouTube runs before visitors have made their cookie choice.

Prescription-only medicines can’t be advertised to the public in the UK or Ireland, a rule plenty of weight-loss websites ignore. This one has been written around it from the first audit: it promotes the consultation, and the medicines appear only as information.

In January 2025, with the Advertising Standards Authority about to start actively checking online weight-loss services, we reworked the site within days: new headline wording, medicine prices and banners taken off the fees and home pages, weight-loss figures taken out of testimonials, and treatment details moved to an information-only Medical Therapies page.

In 2026 the “Am I eligible?” quiz became a plain BMI check. It gives a number and a next step rather than a verdict, names no medicine, and leaves the decision to a doctor. The calculation happens in the visitor’s browser, so nothing is stored or sent. And on the UK site the service is “delivered by Consultant Endocrinologists”: some services that sell on a questionnaire call themselves “doctor-led” because a doctor signs it off, so the site doesn’t use the phrase.

In 2025 the doctors asked about buying a web address for every city. We advised against it, because that tactic stopped working years ago, and set out a plan to grow the one site instead: a page for each city written for that city, information-only pages about the treatments, and articles that respond to the news. The plan also looked ahead to AI search, with pages that assistants like ChatGPT can cite. ChatGPT now shows up among the site’s referrers most weeks.

The doctors review every piece before it goes live. Drafts reach them as shared documents in suggesting mode, so clinical corrections are tracked line by line. News and press become content too: a BBC Arabic interview turned into an article, a Women’s Health feature into a post, a patient survey into videos and articles. The December 2025 article on lower-dose Mounjaro is now the second most visited page from Google.

• Safety · August 2024Fake Meds, Real Risks: How We Safeguard Your Weight Loss Journey
• News · July 2025Rapid Weight Loss: What is “Ozempic Mouth” not telling us?
• Press · November 2025Featured in Women’s Health: Life After Weight-Loss Jabs
• Interview · February 2026Dr Andrew Kernohan on endocrinology and the biology behind weight gain

From June 2025 until the 2026 rebuild, an AI assistant trained on the website and on Dr Kernohan’s own answers took visitors’ questions: 171 conversations, with reports back to the doctors on what people were asking.

When the practice began seeing patients in Ireland, we recommended a separate website rather than an Irish section of the UK one. The rules are different, and so is the language: the HSE rather than the NHS, the Irish Medical Council rather than the GMC, euros rather than pounds. The first Irish site went live in December 2025 and was the top Google result for the practice’s name within two days.

In 2026 the practice opened clinics in Dublin and Letterkenny. Irish rules go further than the UK’s: naming the active ingredient counts as naming the medicine. So the Irish site names no medicines and quotes no medicine prices, and sells the consultation, in person or by video. It went live in its new design on 2 September 2026.

We redrew the logo in two country versions, the UK one with a Union Jack and the Irish one in the colours of the tricolour, so each site shows at a glance which country it serves.

By mid-2026 the UK site had grown piece by piece for two years, and it showed. Prices appeared in nine places and had started to disagree, and the booking system offered six kinds of appointment while the site showed two. We proposed a redesign rather than a tidy-up.

Each round of designs went to the doctors as a single board, with every page on desktop and phone side by side, so they could comment on the whole site at once: four rounds for the UK and two for Ireland. Both sites were then rebuilt in WordPress with Etch and Automatic.css.

• One settings screen holds every fee, so a price change shows everywhere at once
• Doctify reviews come in automatically and appear in the site’s own design, with each doctor’s rating
• Nothing from Google, Vimeo or YouTube loads until a visitor has made their cookie choice
• Matching UK and Irish pages are paired, so Google shows people the right country’s site
• Every one of the old site’s 45 web addresses still works, so no link or search result was lost

Before the UK site went live on 23 September 2026 we checked it from fourteen angles, from compliance and accessibility to security and speed. 163 issues were raised and 151 confirmed, and everything that mattered for launch was fixed first.