Websites for clinics, practices and allied health
People arrive on a health site worried, often in a hurry, sometimes on an old phone. The site’s job is to answer the practical questions fast: can you help, are you open, how do I book. All without making anyone feel processed.
Where practice websites fall down
Healthcare carries obligations most sectors do not. These are the recurring gaps.
Accessibility is treated as optional
A patient population skews older and includes people with impaired vision, hearing and motor control. Low-contrast text and unlabeled forms exclude exactly the people you serve, and in the US, inaccessible healthcare sites attract litigation.
The practical details are buried
Hours, address, parking, which practitioners are taking new patients, what to bring. These are the reasons people visit the site, and they are usually three clicks deep.
Booking is a phone number and a hope
If the practice management system supports online booking and the site does not use it, reception absorbs calls that did not need to happen.
Forms collect health information carelessly
A contact form that invites people to describe symptoms is collecting sensitive health data. Where that data goes, and who can read it, is a question with legal weight.
Practitioner credentials are vague
Registration details, qualifications and areas of practice are what a cautious patient checks. Stock photography and a first name do not answer it.
Third-party scripts leak visits
An embedded widget or ad pixel on a page about a specific condition can disclose something genuinely private about the visitor to a company they have never heard of.
What a healthcare site actually needs
- WCAG AA as a baseline, not a retrofit. Readable contrast, keyboard navigation, real form labels, tested rather than asserted.
- The practical answers first. Hours, location, parking, who is accepting new patients, what to bring, visible without scrolling.
- Booking wired to your existing system where it supports it, instead of a second calendar nobody reconciles.
- Practitioner pages with real credentials. Registration, qualifications, languages spoken, areas of practice.
- Forms scoped deliberately. Enough to make an appointment, and an explicit instruction not to send clinical detail through the website.
- A restrained third-party footprint, so page visits are not quietly reported to advertising networks.
- Condition and service pages written to inform rather than to rank, because health content that oversells is both a compliance and a trust problem.
- Content your staff can maintain. Hours and practitioner changes should not require a developer.
We build to reduce privacy and accessibility risk, and we will tell you plainly where a decision has legal weight. We are not lawyers, and nothing here is a compliance certification: your obligations under HIPAA, PIPEDA or the Privacy Act should be confirmed with someone qualified to advise on them.
What we would bring to it
UI/UX Design
Accessibility and clarity decided at design time, where they are cheap.
View serviceWeb Development
The build, including booking integration and how form data is handled.
View serviceWebsite Maintenance
Patching and monitoring, which matters more when the site holds personal data.
View serviceHow we handle your access and data
Practical habits we actually follow on every project, not certifications we do not hold.
- Your accounts, our own loginsYou create a user for us on your hosting, CMS and tools. We never ask for your personal password.
- Two-factor authentication everywhere2FA on every account we use, with credentials kept in an encrypted password manager, never in email or chat.
- Staging before liveChanges are tested on a staging copy first, and a fresh backup is taken before anything goes live.
- Access removed at the endWhen a project ends we hand back every login, and remove our access or leave it to you, whichever you prefer.
- NDA on requestHappy to sign a mutual NDA before you share anything confidential.
- No sensitive data on our sideWe do not store patient records or payment card data. We make no HIPAA or SOC 2 certification claims; we build so the website is not your weak point.
Common questions from practices
A website is not certified compliant. Compliance is a property of your whole operation. What we can do is build so the site is not the weak point: no protected health information collected through the site unless there is a proper agreement covering where it goes, encrypted transport, restrained third-party scripts, and a clear instruction to patients not to send clinical detail through a web form. Anyone promising you a “HIPAA compliant website” as a product is overselling.
If your practice management system offers booking, we connect to it so there is one source of truth. If it does not, we would sooner send people to a phone number that gets answered than run a second calendar that reception has to reconcile by hand.
More here than almost anywhere. Your visitors are disproportionately older or unwell, which is exactly the group an inaccessible site excludes. In the United States it is also an active area of litigation against healthcare providers. We build to WCAG AA and test it, not claim it.
It helps people decide whether you are the right practice, and it is the honest version of health SEO. What it should not do is imply outcomes or make claims your professional body would object to. Write to inform; let the ranking follow from that, not the other way round.
Let’s talk about your practice
A free consultation, including a straight read on where the current site creates accessibility or privacy risk.