How WordPress blog theme DW Minion helps me get more clients & a higher page rank

Me & my passion for psychoeducation

My name is Marius Pentilie. I am a clinical psychologist and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist in Cluj-Napoca – Romania. Beside having my own private practice, I also work as a career counselor expert at Babes-Bolyai University, one of the best in Romania.

As a psychologist and psychotherapist, I think psychoeducation is very important. People should learn how therapy can help them solve their problems. And since psychology is a science that evolves quite fast while on the Internet there is a lot of outdated information on this, people need to stay updated to the latest advances.

Therefore, in order to share my knowledge about psychotherapy that I’ve acquired through many years of experience and education, I started my own blog on Blogger. The central goal of my blog is to educate people about cognitive-behavioral therapy. I tried to bring out not only my point of view, but also the latest information and techniques based on scientific researches and evidences.

The reasons I switched my blog to WordPress & DW Minion

I had been working with this free weblog publishing tool from Google for a few years, until recently when I decided to switch to something different and more professional. I need a new platform and new design to build a stronger connection with my clients and support them better.

So when Alex Weber, a friend of mine, showed me the benefit of running a website on WordPress and suggested to help me build a new site with this platform, I agreed instantly to this change. The site was named as Mental Training since I see myself as of a trainer who motivates and teaches others techniques to fight with problems and disorders.

After choosing the name for the site, we wasted no time in working on the concept of Mental Training. Alex proposed to use DW Minion, the minimal WordPress blog theme by DesignWall team and I liked it very much. The design is clean yet elegant that emphasizes the content of the blog and is simple to use.

DW Minion & my first time working with HTML

Before working on Mental Training, I didn’t have any experience with WordPress. The only thing I knew was that it offers good features to help with SEO. I started learning to use the theme and it was quite simple. I even learned from Alex how to work with HTML – another thing I didn’t know before this project.

The purpose of the blog is to be a place for updated information and inside view of psychology, psychotherapy and more. It is also aimed to give support for my clients with access to different psychotherapy methods and an online interaction with a psychologist. And I must say DW Minion helped us pretty much to achieve those goals. In two months Mental Training was ready to go live.

We tried to keep the site minimal and simple with as few colors, plugins and gadgets as possible. We used green as the dominant color to redecorate the site as well as to make business cards and brochures. I don’t think that I would need to change anything if I had to start all over again.

After we finished the site, I started to optimize it for search engine. The SEO plugin we used was very helpful. It shows us how to write an optimized post as to what words to include, where to include theme (in title, h tag, meta description or text), how long a post should be and other things like that.

At first, I was somehow worried that the site didn’t look good on older versions of Internet Explorer browser, as DesignWall WordPress themes support IE9 and upper versions only.  But I soon learned that not many people use that browser, and if they can’t access the site from Internet Explorer, they can still access it from other browsers. So it’s really not a big deal any more.

My page rank improved & I got more clients

When Mental Training was perfectly done, I received many good feedbacks from friends, clients, designers and other psychologists. My page rank improved and I got more interested clients.

Some of you may wonder how come someone least techie like me can work on a website and know how to improve SEO. As I said, I am a psychologist, not a designer or web developer. But I’d always like to do my utmost and learn as much as I can from others. Working on Mental Training project was my way of personal development.

For everyone who wants to start a blog, I think the most important thing is the concept. If you have an excellent concept behind it, everything would go on the right path from the very beginning.

Well, that’s all for my story. You guys can always reach me at Marius Pentilie for further details on this 🙂