Web design for medical and healthcare practices.

A clinic website has more than one reader and they do not want the same things.

A patient who typed a symptom into a phone wants to know whether you treat it, whether you are taking anybody new, and how to reach a human being. A referring office wants your criteria, your current wait and a way to send a referral without picking up a phone. A nurse or an administrator thinking about leaving their current job wants to know what it is like to work there.

Then there is the fourth reader that almost every practice site forgets about. An existing patient, on a Sunday, trying to find out whether you are open on the Monday holiday.

Most of your traffic is housekeeping

Pull a year of analytics off nearly any practice site and the shape is the same. Hours, location, phone number and whatever passes for a contact page sit at the top. The carefully written page about the practice philosophy sits near the bottom with the privacy policy.

That is not a failure, it is what a clinic site mostly is. People who are already your patients use it as a utility. Where do I park. Which door. How do I cancel without being charged. How do I get my results. Do I need a requisition. What do I bring. Are you open between the holidays.

Build that layer first and build it in plain text. Hours as words rather than as an image, because an image of your hours is invisible to a screen reader and to a search engine at the same time. A number that dials on a tap. Holiday closures posted before the holiday rather than after somebody drives over. The side entrance, the elevator, the buzzer code, the accessible parking spot that is around the back. The fax line, if you still run one, because the rest of the health system does.

Acquisition pages come after that. Not before.

Accessibility is a standard with law behind it

Ontario sets a web accessibility standard under the AODA, and whether it binds you turns on what kind of organization you are and how many people you employ. Designated public sector organizations and private organizations with fifty or more employees have to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA on public web content, with live captioning and pre-recorded audio description carved out. A small independent practice sits below that line.

Sitting below the line is not a reason to skip it. The population an inaccessible site excludes is older, sees less well, has less dexterity and takes more medication than the general population, which is a description of your waiting room.

The failures repeat from clinic to clinic and all of them are cheap to avoid.

• Hours and holiday notices published as a picture of text.
• Intake and consent forms uploaded as scans. A scanned PDF is a photograph of a form, unreadable to assistive technology and to anybody who cannot get to a printer.
• A booking widget dropped in from a third party that cannot be operated with a keyboard. The rest of the site passes and the one thing the site exists to do does not.
• Pale grey body text, because it looked calm in the design review and nobody tested it against a real contrast ratio.
• Headings used as decoration rather than as structure, so the page has no outline for anybody navigating by one.

One more detail worth carrying into a vendor conversation. The regulation names WCAG 2.0, while the working bar in practice is now 2.1 or 2.2 at the same level, because that is what assistive technology, hospital procurement and anyone filing a complaint will assume.

Where the privacy rule actually bites

The moment a form collects information about somebody's health you are handling personal health information, and PHIPA has expectations of a custodian that ordinary website plumbing was never built to meet.

Most contact forms do one thing: take the fields, email them to a shared inbox, and keep a copy in the website database because that is the default. Fine for a newsletter signup. Not fine for "I have had chest pain since Tuesday", which is what somebody will type into a box labelled how can we help, no matter what you label it.

The practical version of compliance looks like this.

• Keep the public form to contact details and a reason for contact picked from a short list. No open clinical text box.
• Say on the form itself not to include medical details, and put the secure route next to the sentence rather than three clicks away.
• Switch off database storage of submissions. If the form has to send mail, send a notification that something arrived rather than the contents of it.
• Push anything clinical into your secure intake or your record system, under a written agreement with whoever supplies it.
• Audit the tags. An advertising pixel sitting on a booking confirmation page, or an analytics event carrying a condition name inside the URL, is the kind of disclosure nobody intended to make. Session replay tools that record what people type are the same problem wearing a different logo.

None of this is exotic. It is the part a general web agency gets wrong because nobody on the project has worked in health.

Booking is frequently not booking

Agencies arrive carrying a book now button, because every other sector has one. In a lot of healthcare it is simply the wrong verb.

Specialist practices run on referrals. Parts of allied health run on self-booking. Primary care runs on a roster that may be closed. Publicly funded programs run on intake with eligibility criteria attached. One button cannot represent that, and getting it wrong fills your inbox with people you cannot help while the referring office quietly gives up.

Say what the route is, in the reader's words.

• Whether you are accepting new patients, with the date the status was last checked. This is the single most searched question about any practice and the one most sites leave ambiguous.
• Referral criteria, and what you do not take. Saying no in public saves everybody a cycle.
• A referral form that can be filled and sent without a phone call, alongside the fax number and the eReferral route your region uses.
• The current wait, as a range. Referring offices sort by wait more than by anything else you could put on a page.
• What is publicly covered and what is not. If you bill for uninsured services, the fee list belongs on the site, and your college has views on how it is presented.

Patients search a symptom, referrers search a criterion

Patients do not type your specialty. They type the body part, what it is doing, how long it has been doing it, and where they are. Pages built around conditions in ordinary language intercept exactly that, and they can introduce the clinical name once they have the reader.

Referring offices search in a different register. They search the procedure, the eligibility threshold, the wait and the clinician's name, and those deserve their own pages written in clinical language, because the audience is clinical.

Underneath both, every practitioner needs a page that ranks for their own name. Patients check who they are about to see, and a profile on a rating site will happily take that search if you leave it. All of this is ordinary search work, sitting on top of a properly built Google Business Profile carrying hours, accessibility attributes and, where the structure allows it, a listing per practitioner.

Languages, done properly or not at all

Clinics serve the population around them, and across a lot of Ontario that population does not read in English by preference.

The useful version of this is small. List the languages each clinician and each front desk shift actually works in, because patients filter on precisely that and almost nobody publishes it. Then translate the handful of pages carrying the practical load: how to become a patient, how to get here, what to bring, how to cancel. Translate them with a human who works in health.

Do not machine translate clinical instructions and leave them up. A mistranslated instruction is not a marketing problem.

The careers page is a revenue page

Staffing is the constraint in most practices and the careers page is usually one line and an email address.

Publish the shift pattern, full or part time, the software you run, who the new person reports to, how big the team is and what the role pays. The pay range is the thing most clinics refuse and the thing that decides whether a good candidate opens the email at all. A practice that cannot hire cannot take patients, which makes that page as commercial as anything else on the site.

The healthcare work we are not naming

We have built in this field. None of it appears on this page by name, because not every client wants their site used as a sales asset, and that is their call rather than ours.

So judge the argument instead. The list above is not a reading list, it is where these projects actually get difficult: the accessibility audit nobody budgeted for, the form that had to stop emailing itself, the referral path that turned out to be three phone calls long, and the meeting about which of your three audiences gets the top of the home page. If you want to assess build quality rather than sector knowledge, the work page carries sites from other sectors and the engineering underneath them is the same.

Cost and timeline

Quotes on a build open at $5,000. A clinic site rarely sits at the opening figure, because three audiences means three paths through the same site, and the accessibility and privacy work is real work rather than a box ticked at the end. You get one fixed number in writing, invoiced phase by phase as each phase lands.

The build occupies 1.5 to 3.5 weeks of calendar. What stretches a healthcare project past that is never the code. It is internal review: a privacy officer, a college advertising standard, and three partners who each want a different word in the first sentence. Accessibility remediation on a site you already own is quoted on its own, because an audit and a repair is a different job from a build.

If you want the arithmetic before you speak to anybody, what a website costs sets it out, and how to pick a web designer lists the questions worth putting to us. If one of your audiences is being badly let down and you already know which, say so and we will start there.