More on Building a Website for Your Private Practice — And a TherapySites.com Promo Code
Here’s a quick update on our suggestions for building a site featuring your private practice, including a promo code for popular outsourcing service TherapySites.com.
I’ve recently updated our article on options for building a private practice website to include a mention of TherapySites.com (and its UK equivalent, MyTherapySites.co.uk), one of a relatively new breed of bundled services offering a ‘complete package’ of site, hosting, maintenance, and various value-added services like shopping carts, appointment request systems, marketing assistance, and the like.
Since that article was originally written half a decade or so ago, I’ve been contacted many times by folks at various firms selling similar services who wanted me to give them some exposure; I’ve always declined to mention them, even when they wanted to pay to advertise on this site. Why? Quite frankly, most of their customers’ sites I’ve seen are pretty awful, full of poor coding and sometimes quite ludicrous volumes of primitive attempts at search engine optimisation. (One such service based in the UK used to be very popular with UK psychotherapists who unfortunately didn’t seem to know any better; it was so atrocious I won’t even mention it by name. When I sat down to update our article about site building, I dropped by to see whether it had improved in the last few years and discovered that on the contrary, it seems to have gone out of business entirely, with the domain now redirecting elsewhere. I have no idea what might have happened to all those practitioners who got stuck when the service ceased operations. My point in even mentioning it now that it no longer exists? Caveat emptor!)
TherapySites.com, however, is the first one I’ve felt happy mentioning here. Like many such services, it offers a selection of pre-made site designs, rather than creating new designs for each new customer. While this means you might wind up sharing your site design with a competitor, it also can lower the cost very significantly, as compared to creating a whole new site design from scratch. The site designs, like so many, are actually full of invalid code, but at least in the case of TherapySites.com sites, most of these are due to an incorrect DOCTYPE declared at the top of the source code — rather than the sorts of severe underlying structural problems which I’ve seen with sites produced by other services. Visually speaking, I think they’re clean and usable. And fortunately, they’re not stuffed with pseudo-SEO junk.
I’ve been sufficiently impressed with what I’ve seen that I’ve agreed a special promotion with TherapySites.com (and MyTherapySites.co.uk) so that if you decide to use the service, and you enter the promo code “PromoCR” at checkout, you’ll receive a full month for free. (And we at CounsellingResource.com will receive a fee for having referred you.) As of this writing, the free month is worth $59. Note that as I indicated above, I’ve never been sufficiently impressed with any other service of this type even to mention it; this is the first and so far only occasion that I have agreed to ‘promote’ a site-building service here at CounsellingResource.com.
So, if you’re looking for a fully outsourced solution to the problem of creating and maintaining a web presence for your private practice, I’d encourage you to have a look.
