This website was designed and written in its entirety by Jane McCampbell, a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified EMDR therapist. It was created using Homestead Sitebuilder with images purchased from Shutterstock.
Jane's former career was in marketing and brand strategy, a skillset that has helped significantly in the promotion of her private therapy practice. As a result, Jane frequently receives questions from other therapists regarding their online presence. She has provided this page as a resource to help therapists get started on creating their own websites. She also hopes that this page can assist in promoting best practices, such as avoiding plagiarism and maintaining appropriate collegial respect in the online space.
Why have a website?
Have you ever wanted to make a referral to an experienced, established therapist whom you know has been in the business for years, but you can't find a contact number for them anywhere? You're not alone. The word-of-mouth, referral-based model that served the older generation of therapists for so many years is no longer as effective in the digital age. Frequently, these more experienced therapists are losing business to the new web-savvy graduates who might be novices in therapy but know how to get their names out there. Even when clients still come through the referral network, most will check out their prospective therapists online first before making any calls, and will be more likely to choose the one with the website. So how do you go about getting an online presence? The various options are listed below.
Online Directories
If you're not ready to go all out for your own website yet, at least list your practice on an online directory. There are many available - several of them amateur money-spinners that aren't worth the price of your subscription. The secret to remember is that most of these online directories are not used by clients so much as by other therapists trying to find numbers to make a referral. In order to keep your referral network live, your phone number needs to be findable. The best option is to pick one directory - preferably a large, well-established one such as Psychology Today - and get your details up there.
TherapySites
If you are ready to make the jump to a website but have no idea where to start, there's no better option available than TherapySites. Therapy sites is an organization that exists purely to provide websites for therapists and costs around $60 a month. They have a number of templates to choose from that come pre-loaded with copy (text) which means you can literally go live with a professional-looking site in ten minutes. Then you can spend the next year, two years or even more customizing the copy and creating new pages to your own preferences. TherapySites also do a lot of the work that other services don't - such as submitting your site to all of the relevant search engines to ensure that the likes of Google and Yahoo have you indexed in their listings. They also provide a very useful education on the how to get the best out of your website, including great advice on Search Engine Optimization and Meta-tags which helps you improve your rankings, and how to use Google's tools to track and analyze your website's visitors. If all that weren't enough, their customer service is extremely responsive and personable, so if you do get stuck, help is always at hand.
The only downside of TherapySites is that they have a very limited ratio of templates to therapists using the service, which means that you might well find another therapist down the road with the same web design as you. If the therapist specializes in another field or serves a different clientele, this isn't too much of a problem. If, however, the therapist has a practice that is similar to yours and both sites are likely to be seen by the same potential clients, it becomes a substantial risk to your brand. An ethical approach would be to do a Google search for other therapists in your area BEFORE you choose or change your TherapySites template, and to try avoid designs already in use by therapists with similar practices. If you have been using TherapySites for a while and suddenly find that another therapist has recently adopted the same template as you, there is unfortunately very little recourse available to you, other than writing and appealing to their sense of collegial respect, which may or may not be as attuned as yours. If (as is sadly likely) they simply say "too bad", it may be time to take all the good stuff you've learned from TherapySites and switch to a service that isn't therapy-specific. At least that way, if you do share your site design with someone else, they'll be in a different industry.
Creating your own website
There are basically four options for creating your own website:
1) Paying a designer
It's worth pointing out at this juncture that website creation is an unbelievably intensive business from both a time and cost standpoint. Paying a designer to create even a simple site for you will likely cost around $5,000 and will still necessitate a lot of work on the front end from you, such as deciding on your pages and writing your copy. Unfortunately, since most of us have an extremely hard time articulating our design likes and dislikes, there is no guarantee that you'll like the end result. You'll also need to figure out whether you or your designer are responsible for registering the domain name and finding a host for your website which will need to be paid for over and above the design fees. A further consideration is how much control you will have over the site once it's launched - whether you'll have the ability to make changes to the copy yourself, or whether you'll be calling the designer and paying an hourly rate every time you need to amend your fee or upload new paperwork. A common pitfall is accepting the offer of help from a young relative or the recently graduated graphic design student next door. Neither will have yet learned the crucial skill of asking the right questions to arrive at the right results, and may not be as committed as you are to getting the project completed in a timely way. All in all, paying an independent designer to create a custom website really isn't a cost-effective option for a solo practitioner, so unless your offspring or spouse does it for a living, you'd be better off pursuing one of the alternatives below.
2) Using a pre-designed template
A number of website creation companies such as Weebly and Homestead Sitebuilder provide a broad selection of professionally designed templates that you can adopt and make your own. You simply choose a template, add your text, tell the service what you'd like your website address to be and pay a monthly subscription (anything between $5 and $20) for the privilege. You can make changes to your site at any time and keep it for as long as you pay the subscription. One of the main differences between the various services is the number and quality of the tempates provided and the ease of customization. Some services require knowlege of HTML (the computer language of websites) to make even the most basic changes to their set templates, while others overwhelm you with so many options of colors and fonts that you don't know where to begin. If you are willing to just take a template as it is - colors and all - Weebly is probably one of the best options for modern, attractive designs. If you'd like a little more flexibility, Homestead Sitebuilder offers a greater number of less inspiring designs that are much easier to customize.
3) The best of both worlds
An alternative is to opt for a "best of both worlds" scenario. Most of the website services give you the option of paying one of their designers to create a custom site for you, which they will then turn over to you to maintain and manage. This option will cost around $2,000 for the initial design plus the monthly subscription of $5-$30 but does give you a unique, professionally designed site with the domain name, hosting and all of the updating control that you need. As with the above options, you would still need to do a lot of your own work up front to write the copy and brief the designer on the layout of your pages and your design preferences, but the risk is much less than going the independent designer route.
4) Designing a website from scratch yourself
While professional designers use expensive software such as Dreamweaver and Photoshop to create their sites, the good news is that you don't have to. Most of the web services available provide a site-building option that gives you the tools to create your own site from scratch if you have some basic design skills are so inclined to have a go. They cost $5-$30 a month and provide you with your domain name and the website hosting as part of the package. These include Weebly and Homestead Sitebuilder as mentioned above, but there are many others including Wix, Squarespace, Webstarts and FatCow to name only a few. As with the template options, the main difference between the services is ease of use, which largely depends on your familiarity with computers, design packages and, quite honestly, your generation. Some services offer extensive tutorials for the uninitiated which are probably helpful if you have the time and patience to sit through them, while others are much more intuitive.
Most of these services contain a library of images that you can use for free as part of your monthly subscription. If you want images a little more customized - perhaps pictures that match those in your office - you can purchase royalty-free images fairly cheaply from sites such as iStockphotography or Shutterstock.
Choosing the service that's best for you
While it's very easy to get started with a web-host, changing services is a huge nuisance, so be sure to choose carefully. Most services will lock you in on their first screen by asking you what you'd like your domain name (web address) to be, and then registering it for you, making it very difficult for you to switch. The way to shop around is to enter a domain name that you don't want to keep, and save your preferred domain name for the service you like best.
It is also important to note that what may appear to be dramatic price differentials between services may reflect the amount of additional work a service offers to ensure your site gets found by search engines. While some services automatically submit your domain name and provide sitemaps as part of your fee, others charge you on top of the subscription you signed up for, while others expect you to do this all yourself. The responsiveness and helpfulness of customer support also differs significantly between services. You may wish to run a few Google searches for "best website hosts" or "best website builders" and see what users are saying before you make your decision. Although TherapySites seems extremely expensive in comparison to the cheap options out there, the price is a reasonable ball-park for a true all-inclusive service with design tools, copy to get you started, great customer service and all the search-engine extras that ensure your site will be found by your intended audience.
Maintaining ethical practice and respectful collegial relations in the online space
The Problem of Plagiarism
The exponential growth of the web has provided a significant headache for governments, academic institutions and corporations across the globe from an intellectual property standpoint, due to the fact that it is so easy to copy from websites without detection. Sadly, the therapeutic community is not immune to the unethical and unlawful practice of plagiarism. Although problems that arise are mostly due to ignorance rather than deliberate attempts to defraud or steal intellectual property, it behooves all of us to be aware of the issues at stake when creating an online presence for ourselves.
The Basics of Copyright Law
The biggest problem is due to a misconception that any information on the web is "in the public domain" and there for the taking, which is actually not the case. The rule of thumb of intellectual property law is that copyright lies with its originator. Therefore, while it may be very easy to copy text from a website, change a few words and make it your own, your actions constitute plagiarism whether or not you get caught doing it. The same applies to images, graphics and photographs which shouldn't be taken from websites any more than paintings should be taken from a therapist's waiting room.
Text and Images
Another place of confusion arises when organizations such as TherapySites provide standardized copy for anyone who uses their service. If you are paying for the service, you are deemed to have paid for the copy, but as you start making small changes it can become very difficult to remember whose copy was whose. If you then take that copy and transfer it to a new website hosted by another organization, you are no longer paying for the right to use it and may inadvertently cross the line into plagiarism. Similarly, if you use a web design service that comes with an image library, it is not appropriate to download those images to use on another site or in your printed literature. If you want to use images in this way, purchase them from stock photography sites such as Shutterstock or iStockphotography instead.
Intake Paperwork and Policy Documents
A number of therapists choose to make their intake paperwork available on their websites so that clients can easily access it and complete it before their first appointment. Policy documents pertaining to sliding scale fees and privacy practices are also often made available this way. Please note that these documents are also subject to copyright, and should not be reproduced or adopted - in part or in whole - without the explicit permission of the creator. If you are looking for ideas for your paperwork, a great resource is Edward L. Zuckerman's The Paper Office which comes with a handy CD of downloadable templates.
Scales and Inventories
If you make use of scales and inventories such as the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, A.T., Steer, R.A., & Brown, G. K., 1996) or the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein Carlson, E. & Putnam, F.W., 1986) be sure to secure the appropriate permissions or pay the publishers for copies before posting them on your website. All such scales should be properly cited.
Protecting your Intellectual Property
Because the problem of website plagiarism is so significant, an organization called Copyscape offers a free service for anyone with a website to check for similar copy on any other websites currently on the web. Simply type in your URL and Copyscape will alert you to websites that feature similar text to yours. Copyscape also provides banners that you can put on your website to alert potential content-thieves that you will be in touch if your copy is stolen.
The Rule of Thumb
While there is no way to completely prevent or seek recourse for theft of copy, design or images on the web, the best approach is to adopt an attitude of ethical practice and encourage others to do so too. In sum, only use it if you created it, paid for it, or received explicit written permission to do so!
© 2011, Jane McCampbell, MA, LMFT, "Websites and Ethical issues for Therapists"
Marriage Therapist and EMDR Counselor
Jane McCampbell Counseling Services, LLC,
Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN
Jane McCampbell Counseling Services, LLC Baker Court, 821 Raymond Avenue, Suite 325, St Paul, MN 55114 Tel: 612 414 0383
