Anaks Labs
Article 08

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

  • 1. Is there anything to start from?

    This sounds facetious and it is not. When we drew practices at random from the federal provider registry, roughly one in three had no website of their own that we could find — a directory entry, a social page, and nothing a patient could be sent to. If that describes you, the entire redesign conversation is the wrong conversation, and 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 →

  • 2. What exactly is being replaced — the surface, or what sits under it?

    Ask it in those words and listen for whether the answer stays on the surface. Colours, photography, layout, a new logo treatment and a modern feel are all descriptions of the first purchase. If nothing in the answer refers to what the page hands over to anything that is not a person, then you have your answer and it is a perfectly legitimate one — just not the other one.

  • 3. If every word and every photograph stayed exactly as it is, what would change?

    This is the most useful single question in the list, because it forces the difference into the open. A supplier selling the second purchase has a substantive answer to it. A supplier selling the first will struggle, because in that purchase the words and the photographs largely are the site.

  • 4. Who owns the result, and can you leave with it?

    The domain, the content, the images you paid a photographer for, and the site itself. Ask what you would be able to take with you if you ended the relationship in a year, and get the answer before you sign rather than after. Practices discover the answer to this at the worst possible moment with remarkable regularity.

  • 5. Can you change your own hours without asking anybody?

    Every practice changes its hours, its staff and its prices. If each of those requires an email and a wait, the site will be wrong for some fraction of every year, permanently — and what is wrong on your site is what will be repeated about you elsewhere. Ask to be shown the editing, not told about it.

  • 6. What happens to the addresses that already work?

    Every page on your current site has an address, and some of those addresses are printed on cards, linked from directories and saved in patients' phones. Ask what becomes of them. "We will keep the same structure" and "we will point the old ones at the new ones" are answers. A blank look is also an answer.

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

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 →