A Children's Hospital Website Built for How Families Search
Built for families, backed by research
When a parent’s child is hurt, scared, or sick, they don’t have time to hunt through menus. Dayton Children’s Hospital came to Cardinal with a site that buried the moments families needed most—scheduling, finding a doctor, and understanding conditions.
Every Cardinal website starts with the patient. We grounded the redesign in research, shaped the experience around real patient journeys, and built every page for usability and conversion. The technical foundation was engineered for search and discoverability from day one—ready to perform in Google today and the AI-driven search experiences shaping how families find care next.
About Dayton Children's Hospital
Dayton Children’s Hospital is a leading pediatric health system serving families across the Dayton, Ohio region. As the region’s only fully staffed emergency centers by board-certified pediatricians, Dayton Children’s delivers comprehensive care built entirely around kids.
Their services span a wide range of pediatric specialties, including:
- Emergency and urgent care
- Pediatric orthopedics and sports medicine
- Primary care and specialty services
- Kids Health educational resources
Challenges:
- Critical conversions buried in the old site
- Outdated design disconnected from the brand
- Weak SEO foundation for organic growth
Goals:
- Surface scheduling and care pathways upfront
- Align the experience to real patient journeys
- Build a search foundation to fuel future growth
Research that maps real patient journeys
We don’t guess at what patients want. Before a single wireframe, we ran a two-part research program to understand the families Dayton Children’s serves.
Qualitative. 30-minute interviews with a mix of community-recruited and network-sourced families surfaced the emotions, motivations, and friction points behind care decisions.
Quantitative. A large-scale survey program segmented by care type (chronic/specialty, primary, and urgent/emergency) revealed what families actually prioritize. A mix of close-ended, open-ended, and forced-ranking questions gave us both the patterns and the nuance behind them.
From this, we built persona-based journeys for the audiences that mattered most: the Sports Injury Support Seeker, the Symptom Researcher, the Second Opinion Seeker, existing patients needing records or bill pay, and more. Each journey mapped awareness through follow-up and flagged the exact moments where the old site failed them.
A digital front door families trust
Research told us what families needed. The design delivered it.
We restructured navigation around the jobs people actually come to do—Find a Doctor, Conditions, Treatments, Schedule Appointment—and moved utility items like Bill Pay, MyChart, and Locations into a dedicated top bar so they are always one click away.
The new design system, including color, typography, iconography, and imagery, reflects Dayton Children’s mission of going above and beyond. Warm, confident, and modern. Built to feel like the region’s leading children’s hospital because it is.
Every page is assembled from a library of modular content blocks. That means the team can launch new service pages, provider bios, or location pages without waiting on a developer.
An SEO foundation built for growth
A beautiful site that tanks in search isn’t worth building. Our SEO team led information architecture from the start, so the new website was built to rank. Key foundational moves:
- Simplified dense multi-layered navigation to preserve link equity
- Optimized primary navigation categories around non-branded search demand
- Preserved equity on 5,000+ Kids Health resource pages, 550+ provider bios, and 600+ blog articles through a tight redirect plan
- Built on WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields and custom post types for flexible, developer-less content management
- Integrated HIPAA-compliant analytics, forms, and scheduling so data flows cleanly without compliance risk
- Technical excellence baseline: page speed, crawlability, schema, internal linking, and mobile performance
The result is a site that performs technically, reads well to Google and emerging AI-driven search tools, and gives the content team room to grow into it.
Measurable impact from day one
Post-launch, the redesign delivered on every objective Dayton Children’s set:
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- 67% increase in time on site: families engage deeper and find what they need
- 16% increase in monthly users: organic visibility is up, reaching more of the community
- 123% increase in scheduler engagement: the conversion that matters most more than doubled
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Beyond the numbers, Dayton Children’s now has a digital front door built to keep performing as search evolves, AI reshapes discovery, and the hospital grows.