Options for Building Your Private Practice Website, Part 1

Background Questions About Your Private Practice Website

A big part of deciding how to bring your website into reality is reflecting on what exactly you want it to be or what you personally want from it. If, for example, you only want a page or two to provide your clinic's contact information and a map of how to reach you, there will be little point investing the time to learn XHTML in order to put together your own site. Likewise, if you are determined to build an extensive presence, with lots of your own articles and other items useful to visitors, signing up with one of the myriad 'virtual office' or 'practitioner network' providers will be fairly useless. And if you actually want to practice medicine or deliver mental health services online, an off-the-shelf content management system may not be quite up to the job.

So, before committing in any one direction suggested below -- or another altogether! -- I would encourage you to consider some of the following:

• What will your site be for?
• How much flexibility do you want in terms of altering your site later on?
• How much time are you willing to spend writing content?
• How important is it to you to see your own vision for a web presence expressed in your actual website?
• How much time are you willing to spend learning technical features of site building?
• How much money are you willing to pay someone else to take care of a website for you?
• How much money are you willing to spend on software?
• To what extent does your type of practice (e.g., online counselling vs. working face-to-face) demand that you develop or maintain technical savvy?
• To what extent do you require specific security or HIPAA-compliance features to be part of your web presence?

And don't forget: what seems like 'good enough' for right now might seem like nowhere near enough a year or two from now! (The internet probably is not destined to begin shrinking massively in importance any time soon...) By choosing carefully now, you may save yourself time and money later on as your professional goals develop.

Specific Site-Building Options

Specific site-building options, covered in Part 2 of this article, include:

• paying someone else to do it,
• coding it yourself,
• using a CMS, and
• signing up with a 'virtual office' vendor.

Continue to Part 2...