How We Build a Clinic Website, Stage by Stage

Stage 1: Consultation and planning

We start with a call, planned for forty-five minutes, with the person who will own the website and, if possible, a clinician. We ask about your patients, your services, how appointments are booked today and what goes wrong. If you have used the planner, we start from your brief.

From that call we write a site plan. It lists every page, what each page is for, the main search phrase it should answer, and the features the site needs, such as a booking link, location pages or a CQC rating display. The plan also lists the content we need from you and the dates for clinical review. You agree the plan in writing, and the quote is based on it.

Stage 2: Design and content

Design and writing run side by side. We design the home page, a treatment page and a clinician profile first, on desktop and phone, and agree them with you. Those three set the pattern for the rest of the site.

At the same time, we write the copy. Each treatment page is drafted from a short questionnaire and a call with the lead clinician, then checked against section 12 of the CAP Code^[1] before it goes to your clinicians for review. Fees, opening hours and practical details come from your team.

Stage 3: Review and refinement

The site is built on a private staging address that search engines are told not to index. You, your practice manager and your clinicians review every page there. We collect comments in one shared list so nothing gets lost in email.

Before launch, we run our checks:

• Claims and wording, against the CAP Code and, for aesthetic clinics, the rules on prescription-only medicines.
• Regulator details, including the CQC rating, report link and CQC website address where Regulation 20A applies^[2].
• Forms, tested end to end, with the privacy notice checked against what they collect.
• Accessibility, against WCAG 2.2 AA^[3], with keyboard, screen reader and zoom testing.
• Speed, against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds^[4], on a mid-range phone.
• Search set-up: titles, descriptions, sitemap, structured data and redirects from any old site.

Stage 4: Launch and support

On launch day we point your domain at the new site, apply redirects, submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and test every form again on the live site. For two weeks after launch we check for errors and broken links daily and fix them. At six weeks we review search performance and the forms with you.

After that, ongoing care is optional. It covers updates, backups, security monitoring, small content changes and a yearly accessibility check. You can also manage the site yourself; the handover guide and recorded walkthrough show your team how.

How long each stage takes

A redesign adds about a week for the audit of the current site and the redirect map, so we plan for seven to eleven weeks. Groups with several locations take longer, depending on the number of sites. Clinical review needs time in any schedule, so we agree review dates in the site plan and protect them.

What we need from you

• A named person who can make decisions and gather input from the team.
• About an hour of a lead clinician's time per main service, for the questionnaire, a call and review.
• Your logo and brand colours, if you have them, and photos of your premises and team.
• Access to your domain, current website and any booking or practice management systems the site connects to.
• Your current fees and opening hours.

What you own at the end

You own the domain, the website, its content and the designs. We hand over all logins. If you later move to another designer or host, we help with the move. Nothing about the build ties you to us.