TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
Somebody in Overland Park got a referral this morning, or a new insurance card, or finally decided to do something about the thing they have been ignoring since spring. They have three practice websites open and about four minutes of patience. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites across the Kansas City metro, and I work on a lot of healthcare and practice sites. The pattern is consistent: the clinical work is excellent, and the website answers about half of what a patient needs before they will book.
This is a different job than a normal small business site. A patient is making a decision that costs money, time off work, and a certain amount of nerve, and they are doing it while feeling unwell or anxious. Every unanswered question is a reason to close the tab and try the next practice, and unlike a contractor or a restaurant, you rarely find out you lost them.
The five things a patient checks before they book
In roughly this order, and often in under two minutes:
- Do you take my insurance? This is question one for most people, and it decides everything after it.
- Are you accepting new patients, and how long is the wait?
- Where are you, and where do I park? A Plaza address and a Lenexa address are very different commutes.
- Who exactly am I going to see, and what are they like?
- How do I book, and can I do it right now, at ten at night, without calling?
A site that answers all five fills a schedule. A site that answers two sends the patient to whoever answers four. None of that has anything to do with how the site looks.
Insurance is the first question and the most buried answer
We accept most major insurance plans is not an answer, it is a way of avoiding one, and every patient reads it as maybe. List the plans by name, on their own page, with the date you last checked it. If you are out of network or private pay, say that plainly near the top and explain what it actually means for them: what a session or visit costs, whether you provide a superbill, and roughly what people get reimbursed.
Practices resist this because plans change and the page goes stale. That is a real problem with a simple fix: put the list on a page you can edit yourself in two minutes, and put the date on it. A patient who sees checked September 2026 trusts the page. A patient who sees nothing assumes the worst and calls somewhere else.
Say whether you are accepting new patients
This is the single most common gap I see, and it is strange because the practice always knows the answer. Put it on the home page and on every provider bio. Accepting new patients, next opening in about two weeks. Or: not accepting new patients at this time, here is the waitlist. Both are useful. Silence is not, and silence generates the exact phone calls your front desk least wants.
If some providers are open and others are full, say so per provider. If you offer telehealth, say which states you are licensed in, because a therapist licensed in Kansas and Missouri is answering a question that half the metro has, and nobody wants to fill out an intake form to find out the answer is no.
Provider bios are the page patients actually read
Analytics on practice sites tell the same story every time. After the home page, the most visited pages are the provider bios, usually by a wide margin. People are not choosing a clinic, they are choosing a person, and they want to know what that person is going to be like in a room with them.
So each bio needs a real photo, credentials written in plain English, what they treat, who they tend to work well with, and two or three sentences in their own voice. Translate the jargon. A patient searching for help with panic attacks does not know what CBT or EMDR stand for, and a list of modality acronyms reads like a menu in a language they do not speak. Name the acronym, then say what it means and what it is like.
Booking has to be possible at ten at night
A large share of healthcare searching happens in the evening, after the kids are down and the office is closed. If the only way to become a patient is to call during business hours, you are losing the people who are most motivated at the moment they are most motivated. Online scheduling, a request form that reaches somebody in the morning, or at minimum a clear sentence about when you will call back.
Then tell them what happens next. First visit is 50 minutes, bring your ID and insurance card, paperwork arrives by email two days ahead, parking is free in the garage on the north side. Anxiety about the unknown is a real reason people put off booking, and a paragraph of logistics removes more of it than any amount of reassuring language.
The compliance part nobody mentions until it is a problem
I am not your attorney or your compliance officer, and this is the part of a practice website where you should have both. But two things come up on nearly every project, and it is cheaper to know about them before the build than after.
First, forms. A general contact form that invites someone to describe what is going on is an invitation to send protected health information through whatever inbox that form happens to reach. The usual fix is to keep the public form deliberately narrow, name and contact and a reason for reaching out, and move anything clinical into your portal or EHR where it belongs. Second, tracking. Analytics and advertising pixels on patient-facing pages are a genuine compliance question rather than a marketing one, and HHS has published guidance on online tracking technologies for covered entities. Read it, and decide with your compliance person before anyone pastes a pixel onto a booking page.
Accessibility belongs in the same conversation. Your patients disproportionately include people with vision, hearing, and mobility differences, so the usual accessibility work is not a nice-to-have here. It is a fair share of the people trying to book.
Local search when you have two locations and six providers
Practices have a local search setup most businesses do not: a profile for each physical location, and in many cases individual practitioner listings as well. Each location needs its own Google Business Profile with its own hours and phone number, and its own page on your site, not one Locations page listing both addresses.
Keep the name, address, and phone identical everywhere, including the suite number, because Google treats a mismatch as a reason for doubt. The rest of the local playbook is the same one in how to show up in the map pack, which is where most of this traffic starts for anyone searching a specialty plus a city.
What I would fix first, in order
If you do nothing else this quarter:
- Put an insurance list, by plan name, on its own page with the date it was last checked.
- State on the home page whether you are accepting new patients, and the rough wait.
- Give every provider a real bio with a photo and plain English about what they treat.
- Add online scheduling, or a clear promise about when someone will call back.
- Write the what to expect on your first visit paragraph, logistics and all.
- Claim and complete a Google Business Profile for each location, with photos of the actual office.
That list is mostly writing, not building, which means most of it can happen before anyone touches the design.
If you want a second opinion on yours
I work with practices around Kansas City, from a solo therapist to multi-provider clinics, and I am comfortable telling you the site is fine and the money belongs in staffing instead. If you want to know where yours stands, send me the address and I will go through it the way a nervous new patient would and tell you what they cannot find. If you are further along than that, the ranges are on the pricing page.