Two purchases wearing one word
A practice owner asking around about their website will be quoted for two quite different things, described in almost identical language, at prices that overlap. This article is six questions that separate them. It does not tell you which to buy — that depends on facts about your practice that only you have.
Published · Anaks Labs
The distinction that gets lost
One of these purchases changes what the site looks like. The other changes what the site is. They are sometimes sold by the same person, in the same meeting, with the same slides, and the word used for both is usually whichever one the buyer said first.
That is not necessarily dishonest. A practice asking for a fresher look genuinely is asking for the first thing, and a supplier who delivers exactly that has done the job. The failure happens when a practice buys the first thing while believing it has bought the second — and then, eighteen months later, finds that everything it was worried about is still true, with better photography on top of it.
Six questions, in the order worth asking them.
Six questions
Put each one to whoever is quoting, and listen for which column the answer falls into. The two columns are two different purchases, not a better and a worse one.
| Question | Points to a redesign | Points to a build |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Is there anything to start from? | Nothing to redesign. Roughly one in three practices we drew at random had no site of their own — a directory entry, a social page, nothing a patient could be sent to. Quotes framed around your existing site are quotes for a job that does not exist. Anaks Labs field work: 69 of 200 practices drawn from the registry, or 34.5%. This is a could-not-find result, checked a second way by a different method. What counted, and the second check → |
This is the build, and it is the only thing on the table. |
| 2. What exactly is being replaced — the surface, or what sits under it? | Colours, photography, layout, a new logo treatment, a modern feel. All descriptions of the first purchase, and a perfectly legitimate one. | The answer refers to what the page hands over to something that is not a person. |
| 3. If every word and every photograph stayed exactly as it is, what would change? | The supplier struggles with the question, because in this purchase the words and the photographs largely are the site. | The supplier has a substantive answer. This is the most useful single question in the list, because it forces the difference into the open. |
| 4. Who owns the result, and can you leave with it? | No clear answer about the domain, the content, the photographs you paid for, or the site itself. | You are told, before signing, exactly what you could take with you if you ended it in a year. Practices discover this at the worst possible moment with remarkable regularity. |
| 5. Can you change your own hours without asking anybody? | Each change is an email and a wait, so the site is wrong for some fraction of every year, permanently — and what is wrong on your site is repeated about you elsewhere. | You are shown the editing rather than told about it. |
| 6. What happens to the addresses that already work? | A blank look. Which is also an answer. | “We will keep the same structure” or “we will point the old ones at the new ones”. Some of those addresses are on cards, in directories and saved in patients' phones. |
Anaks Labs field work, 69 of 200, or 34.5%. A could-not-find result, checked a second way. What counted, and the second check →
The trap the whole article is about
A redesign can be completed beautifully, on time, to the brief, and leave every machine-readability problem on your site exactly where it was. It can also introduce them: a headline turned into a piece of custom typography, a service list moved into a slider, a set of answers relocated into a downloadable file — all three are aesthetic improvements and all three are subtractions from what anything else can obtain.
This is not hypothetical. Sixty of the sites we opened were ones other people had already published as good examples of clinic design, and they carried the same faults as the rest at similar rates. Being well made is not protection, because the two properties are not connected.
From our own field work: those sixty are the comparison set, drawn from nine published round-ups rather than from the registry, and we never merge the two groups into one percentage. Both groups, and how each was drawn →
Why a well-made site can be unreadable, with the comparison-set finding →
Before you take a single quote
Write down what you have now. Not a description — the twelve answers from the checklist, dated, plus a handful of transcripts of what assistants currently say about your practice. It takes an evening.
Do it because after the work is finished you will have no way of producing it. Every supplier will tell you the new site is better and they may well be right, but "better" without a before is an opinion, and the before stops being available the moment anybody starts. This is the cheapest insurance available in the entire transaction and almost nobody buys it.
The twelve checks, all of them runnable from a phone →
One thing worth deciding separately
Whether anybody is going to keep working on the site afterwards. A site is not a purchase that finishes; it is something that goes out of date at the speed your practice changes. Whether you are buying an object or an arrangement is a different decision from redesign against rebuild, and conflating the two is how practices end up with a handsome site nobody has touched since launch.
What ongoing work genuinely does, and the four things it cannot do →
Read next
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How to evaluate an agency's SEO claims — questions to ask
The other half of the same meeting: what is being promised, and whether it can be true.
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The gap between what patients see and what machines receive
What the second purchase is actually buying, measured on a specimen we built both halves of.
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What a machine can tell about your practice right now — a checklist
The before you will wish you had recorded.
We had no client site we were permitted to publish, so the reference on this site is a specimen: one invented clinic, one homepage, built twice by us, with the difference counted. Open both builds →