Ten Commandments of your Website

1. You shall update your website on a regular basis – don’t get one if you can’t maintain it and don’t buy one off someone who says you don’t need to update it. They’re lying. Or more likely, they don’t care about your search engine ranking (want to know about SEO…scroll down and read my posts below).
2. You shall have a manageable website – I’m not that mean, yes you should update it but I’m not a web developer and probably neither are you. Just keep it simple and straightforward.
3. You shall do your homework – look at the competition’s websites…no need to keep this national either, go international. See what’s out there, analyze what you like, what works, what doesn’t work, what repels you away from a website quicker than you can say “holy cats! that website burns my eyeballs!”
4. You shall only put up well written content – don’t pile in a whole load of fancy pants psychotherapy terms that the average bear doesn’t understand. Unless your niche is “The Therapist’s Therapist” then write simply and clearly. And optmise for your keywords…don’t know how to do that? Well I wrote a post on it, scroll on friend.
5. You shall not make website visitors hunt for information - nothing will make a visitor click away faster. Where do you practice, how much is it, how can I contact you…put this stuff front and centre. Put your contact details on every page, just make it easy.
6. You shall make your font size big enough - many people can not read font size 9.
7. You shall use gender neutral colours, images and themes - in my practice I target women but my website isn’t pink, pink, pink. Mainly because I’d find that patronising and that’s the last feeling I want to engender on my site but if you work with men and women don’t put butterflies and cherry blossom images all over the place.
8. You shall not use wed design that makes your site difficult to use – no splash pages (splash pages are those annoying “click here to enter” pages, they require Flash), no music (you are not a record label, you are a therapist)…these things can take a long time to download if people don’t have super-fast broadband.
9. You shall think carefully before sharing personal information - this goes without saying for therapists but that doesn’t mean you should go to the other end of the scale and come across as unhuman, you can (indeed, must) inject a bit of your you-ness into your website. It’s why I’d pick you rather than the next person I clicked on the BACP Directory, it’s about the chemistry!
10. You shall only use professional photographs on your website – I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. You are a professional, you trained for a long time, you offer something no one else does, you’re an awesome therapist. You must look professional on your website.

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