Practical advice for getting an owner-run business online and keeping it working. These articles cover the essentials a small site needs, taking bookings and enquiries, payments and deposits, reviews and trust, privacy and consent, with worked examples from clinics, shops, restaurants, letting agents and service trades.
A dental website has one job before anything else: convince a nervous person that booking here is straightforward. The pages that do it, and the order to build them.
Quotes for a clinic website vary by an order of magnitude for what looks like the same thing. What actually drives the number, and what the quote leaves out.
Patients searching for a clinic nearby rarely go past the first few results. What decides whether yours is one of them, without a search agency.
Most people arrive at a clinic website with three or four questions and leave as soon as they have them. Here is what they are looking for, in order.
Two practitioners are two diaries, not one calendar with more slots in it. Where shared-diary scheduling goes wrong, and what a clinic has to get right first.
A cancellation policy is only worth what it is worth in practice. What to put in one, where patients should meet it, and the parts most clinics get wrong.
A missed appointment costs the slot, the preparation and the patient who could have had it. What actually reduces no-shows at a small practice, in the order worth trying.
The reception phone rings while somebody is standing at the desk. How a small practice moves routine appointments onto its own website without losing control of the diary.
Taking a rental booking online is not one feature. It is a dozen small rules that all have to hold at once, and the ones people forget are what cause the double-bookings and the arguments at handover.