Your website is the first meeting — and that changes what it needs to do.

They have opened a tab and closed it again more times than they would admit to anyone. You are not in the room with them — not your training, not your supervision, not the careful work you did last week that you will never be able to share with anyone. What is in the room is a webpage and a cautious potential client.

That page is doing the work of a first meeting. It sets a tone, offers a threshold to step toward or away from, and answers the question the person is actually asking — which is very unlikely to be what modality do you practise? In some form, it is closer to this:

Most therapy websites are not built by someone who has spent years thinking about that question for a living.

There is an established way to get a therapist online: choose a layout, add your text, upload a photograph or two, and pick a colour scheme. It is fast and relatively inexpensive, and for a practitioner who simply needs to be findable, it solves a genuine problem.

But sit where the client sits. Open six therapist websites in six tabs, as someone choosing a therapist is likely to do, and notice what happens. Pebbles, a wooden jetty, the soft green of a field. The same list of concerns. The same hero sentence, built on the same rhythm: a safe, confidential space to explore whatever you bring. None of these sites is doing anything wrong in isolation — the problem appears only when they are seen one after another, which is precisely how prospective clients encounter them.

Six nearly identical sites give someone very little to hold on to. So they delay the choice again — not because any one website drove them away, but because none let them begin to imagine you. And that small act of imagination is what finally allows someone to make contact.

I have sat with people in first sessions for many years, and spent enough time building websites to see where the two processes overlap. Some things happening on a therapy website even a very good designer, without clinical experience, may have little reason to consider.

A first session is regulated. You do not begin with the fullest possible account of yourself. Yet many therapist homepages front-load almost everything — qualifications, accreditations, modalities, philosophy — before the visitor has had a moment to orient themselves. Those facts matter, but very few of them matter in the first fifteen seconds. Sequencing is a clinical skill as much as a design one: not only what needs to be said, but how much can this person take in?

How much of you belongs on the page is a real question of boundaries, not simply branding. Too little, and there is nothing for the client to meet. Too much, and they may be confused before they have even contacted you. That judgement cannot be made by swapping the words in a template's “About me” section.

People rarely read a therapy website once, from beginning to end. They scan it, leave, compare it with another practice, and return later for one particular detail. So it needs clear routes through and clear routes out — room to pause, leave and come back without losing their place.

Most people will look at your face before they read a word. Expression, light, posture, framing, and what sits behind you all communicate before the visitor has consciously registered them — yet the photograph is often treated as little more than an upload field. None of this comes from a preference about design. It comes from having sat at the other end of the process and watched what helps someone arrive.

A template is assembled inside a structure that was decided before anyone knew who you were; your words and practice are fitted into the spaces left. Where your work does not fit — because you also supervise, or work with a particular community, or need a page to do one very specific thing — you adapt yourself to the shape you have been given.

A custom-designed website begins with your practice, and the structure follows what you actually do. If you carry a therapy caseload alongside a supervision practice, the site can address both audiences clearly, rather than tucking supervision into a paragraph near the bottom of a page where no prospective supervisee will find it.

There is also the question of what you own at the end. Much of the therapist-website market runs on a rental model: you pay monthly, and if you stop, the site may cease to exist. That suits some practitioners well — but before signing anything, ask:

You should receive a clear answer. With First Meeting, the website is yours. Off-the-peg can be perfectly good — affordable, and made to fit a great many people adequately. Made-to-measure simply begins with a different question: not how can this person fit what already exists? but what needs to be made for them? The difference is not prestige. It is fit — and a visitor can often sense that care has been taken, even when they could not say why.

There is a simple, free way to judge anyone who designs websites: look at their own. They had complete freedom — no client's preferences to balance, no committee, no inherited brand — only the chance to show what they value when setting the brief themselves. So look properly.

Run that test on me too. That is what the Design Room is for.

Working this way takes longer. We talk first — properly, rather than beginning with a form: who comes to you, what you find yourself saying in first sessions, and what you would not want a client to encounter before meeting you. Then I design and write, and we go back and forth. It does not scale to hundreds of websites a year. It is not meant to.

What it can produce is a website that someone frightened — awake at eleven at night, in their eleventh month of thinking about therapy — can arrive at and feel that there is someone specific on the other side of it. That is the whole job. Everything else — the typography, colour, structure, imagery and photograph — is in service of that one thing.