What I Learned Building a Diabetes Management Website
A few months ago I started building [reversemydiabetes.co]a small health platform focused on helping people manage type 2 diabetes through diet and lifestyle changes. I'm not a doctor — I'm a builder — but the project turned into a genuinely interesting technical challenge, and I wanted to share some of what I learned along the way. Why I started this Type 2 diabetes affects a huge number of people, and a lot of the advice online is either paywalled, badly organized, or written in a way that's hard to act on. I wanted to build something simple: a site that gives people practical, easy-to-follow guidance on blood sugar management, diet planning, and day-to-day habits — without needing a login, a subscription, or a medical degree to understand it. The technical side A few decisions shaped how the site turned out: Content structure over cleverness. Early on I over-engineered the information architecture — trying to build dynamic filtering for every possible diet preference. I scrapped most of it. What actually mattered was clear, well-organized static content: a diabetes diet plan page, a blood sugar basics guide, and a meal-planning section. Simple beats clever when the audience isn't tech-savvy. SEO became a first-class concern, not an afterthought. Health content lives or dies on whether people can actually find it. I spent real time on keyword research — things like "diabetes diet plan," "blood sugar levels," and "type 2 diabetes management" — and restructured pages around what people were actually searching for, rather than what sounded good internally. Performance mattered more than I expected. A lot of the target audience is older, on slower connections, or on older devices. I ended up stripping out a bunch of client-side JavaScript I didn't need and leaned on plain HTML/CSS wherever possible. Lighthouse scores went from "fine" to "actually fast," and bounce rate dropped noticeably. Trust signals are a real UX problem for health content. Unlike a SaaS landing pa