K3 Dental. Specialist dental care, on Saturdays.

K3 Dental found us by word of mouth. In February 2015 Dr Viren Vithlani, a dentist we already worked with, introduced a friend and colleague, Dr Sunny Kotecha, who had liked the website we’d made for Viren’s practice. Viren is now K3’s own Specialist in Periodontics.

Two years later Sunny came back with a brief. K3 was a team of specialist and experienced dentists holding its clinics on Saturdays inside another practice in Leicester, and its website had two audiences: dentists referring patients for specialist treatment, and patients looking for that treatment themselves. Before anything else, it had to explain what K3 was. Our design document that June put it plainly:

The design would be calm and uncluttered, with “a ‘minimalist’ ethic”, and our first mockup answered the two audiences with two panels side by side: For Patients, and For Dentists.

A call in July 2017 changed the brief. Most referrals would come through dentists the team already worked with, so the website’s real audience was patients: people looking for specialist treatment, and perhaps asking to be referred. The two panels went, and K3’s clinic day became the headline. From our notes of the call:

The single menu we had recommended in June was agreed too. K3 offered other dentists referrals rather than courses or other services, so separate areas for patients and for dentists would only have meant writing everything twice. The dentists’ route stayed one click away instead: a Referrals button at the top of every page, and “Refer a Patient to us” under the home page’s opening photo, which is how the site still works.

The words that explain K3 were already in the practice’s own draft, which described its clinicians “convening under the K3 ‘umbrella’”. We kept the umbrella, because people understand it straight away, and the call settled the tagline: K3 Dental, Specialist dental care.

In September 2017 Sunny arranged a professional photographer for a clinic Saturday. In under an hour Paul McMullen photographed the team on a white background: portraits in grey scrubs embroidered with the K3 logo and each dentist’s first name, and groups in scrubs and in shirts and ties.

They were lovely portraits, but a team on plain white could be anywhere, and there were no pictures of the practice itself. So we brought the practice to the portraits: we cut each dentist out of the studio white and set them in front of the building where K3 held its clinics, with its red brick, ornate white doorcase and green Victorian front door.

We tried each portrait in colour and in black and white, at the door and by the windows, and moved the group in scrubs onto a bright clinic background, which still opens the home page. The four at the door still welcome visitors on the About page, and four of the portraits lead the dentists’ own profile pages.

K3’s logo came before us: a light grey K with a long swash and a blue superscript 3, designed by Dental Design Ltd in 2015. In January 2018, with business cards about to go to print, Sunny asked us to add the tagline agreed in July. We set “Specialist Dental Care” with the mark, in a long version and a square one:

We used the long one on the website, because it takes less height at the top of every page and the tagline is easier to read, and suggested the square one for profile pictures and round icons. Sunny agreed:

The same lock-up went onto K3’s business cards and print that year.

The July call had also asked for Straumann’s patient animations on the implants page. We set up a K3 Dental YouTube channel and framed each film with a small K3 logo, opened by a five-second logo intro and closed with an end card showing the team and how to get in touch. They play under “Implant videos” on the dental implants page.

The clinical pages were written by the people who do the work. In September 2017 we set up one shared Google Doc as the single source for the whole site: a site map with a box for each page, the agreed points, ideas for later and the jobs still to do, with suggestions switched on so the dentists could edit it like tracked changes in Word. Sunny wrote the implants page, and most of the clinical pages over Christmas:

Viren’s patient leaflets on gum care became the periodontics page, and every dentist has a page of their own, so that someone who searches for a dentist by name finds them.

We built the site in WordPress from January 2018, page by page on a private copy, and sent a short video walkthrough as it came together. On 1 March:

It went live the next morning, Friday 2 March 2018, and Viren took a look the same day:

A specialist team sharing another practice’s building, phone and front desk needed a few things an ordinary practice doesn’t. These are the small tools we added, from the weeks before launch to this year.

Being found mattered too. From April 2018 we listed K3 in the main business directories under one consistent name, “K3 Dental”, with its own phone number, so that Google could tell it apart from the practice it shared a building with.

The newest tool is the simplest. In May 2026 the practice asked for a way for referring dentists to send x-rays and photos with a referral. Four days later the upload was on the form:

In early 2022 Sunny and Shaila Kotecha took over a practice of their own: Thirty Four Dental, on Leicester Road in Oadby, which in its own words has looked after patients there “for more than 30 years”. K3’s clinics moved with them.

On Sunday 10 April Sunny sent the list: a new logo with Thirty Four Dental, the new address, a new biography and a profile for Shaila. Shaila wrote that night:

By the next morning the site named Thirty Four Dental throughout, Google showed K3’s new address, and the old building’s photos were gone from its Google listing. For the header we set K3’s mark beside Thirty Four Dental’s own logo, over “Specialist team of Thirty Four Dental”, and that summer our 2018 lock-up went onto the signs outside. Two months after the move:

So we look after Thirty Four Dental’s website as well, rebuilt in 2023 as the practice’s main site. K3’s own site stayed, because, as our plan put it, it “has good SEO Google Ranking and attracts leads”. The two are kept in step: new clinicians go onto both on the same day, and one fee document lies behind both. When K3 added a page on sedation for nervous patients in December 2025, we wrote it afresh rather than copy Thirty Four Dental’s, because Google doesn’t reward identical pages. And the team keeps growing, with new clinicians through 2026, among them a Specialist in Paediatric Dentistry.