Everything You Need To Know About Websites For Private Practice
Your website is the biggest place that people will find you. They may go on Psychology Today, but they're going to end up coming and looking at your website. If your website looks like it's from 1999, people will assume that you are not up-to-date in your therapy practices. There are three major ways that you can do websites. You can do it yourself, you can have a company do it where there is a monthly fee, or you can have a custom design.
To do it yourself, you want to know some terms, just in regards to websites. So, imagine a house. You have your foundation of the house, that's what's underground. It's where you have your storage, it's the basic, solid footing of your house. That would be the equivalent, on your website, to your hosting. Your hosting is basically where all the data is stored about your website. I recommend Bluehost, which will cost around $3 to $10 per month. I have dedicated hosting, because of how much traffic I get on my websites, which is around $90 a month. You're not at that point yet, if you're starting a practice. So that's like the bootstrap, do-it-yourself option. What you'll do is, you’ll have your hosting and then, next, you're going to have the design of your website. So that's going to be on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace. Those are all basically design platforms and some of them are more expensive than others. I'd recommend doing the paid version of whatever you end up using, just because the free version ends up limiting you so much. If you build it in Wix, or Squarespace, you need to stay in those platforms. If you eventually want to change your look, I would say go with WordPress, because the functionality is just so much more and it's free to use other, than your hosting. So then, that's kind of the design of your house.
Next, we have your address and that's the WWW. Often, that's just included in the price for your hosting and other things. A couple of elements that you want to have in your website is: keep the menu items small with just the essentials. For example, ‘Home’, ‘About Me’ or ‘About Us’, ‘Getting Started’, maybe ‘Counseling Blog’ (so you can rank higher in Google), and then ‘Schedule An Appointment’. Have that last one be a different color than everything else, so it really pops out. Some other things that you want to have, is you want your phone number to be right at the top somewhere so that people can call right away. Also, make sure that the words ‘counseling’ and ‘therapy’ are above the fold, so people don't have to scroll and they know right away that you are a counseling practice.