I Hid a Plastic Surgeon’s Gallery Instead of Fixing It

Last week I emailed a plastic surgeon I hadn’t spoken to since 2021 and asked her for one thing. A photo of her own gallery page, taken on her phone, right where she was sitting.

No explanation. I didn’t offer one and she didn’t ask for one.

It came back inside four minutes with a question mark after it. A heading, a lot of white space, and a line of gray text telling her to come back on a computer.

I wrote that line. Spring of 2021, on a Thursday, at about half past four in the afternoon.

One bad Thursday, I told myself at the time, and I believed that until this summer. Plastic surgeon sites clear Google’s mobile check 76.7% of the time, which is the worst this trade does on anything I run.

So her gallery was never the odd one out. It was the trade, and mine was the one with my invoice on it.

What I did that day

Her before and after gallery was the best thing on the site and the only page that failed on a phone.

Rows of paired photographs, sized for a desktop screen, exactly the way the photographer delivered them and exactly the way she’d been showing them off in the consultation room for years.

The honest fix was an afternoon of work. Teaching those rows to fall into a single column once the screen narrows, making the taps big enough for a thumb that isn’t aiming carefully, then opening the thing on a real handset to see whether any of it worked.

An afternoon isn’t a design job and it isn’t a rebuild. It’s a couple of hours from whoever holds the login to your website, and nobody has to redraw your logo or rewrite a word to get it done. It sits at the plainest end of making a page work in one hand, which is why it goes first when a launch date is close.

I didn’t have an afternoon. I had forty minutes and a client waiting on a launch date she’d already told her patients about.

So I wrote one line of code telling the gallery to vanish below a certain screen size, dropped in that gray sentence about desktop computers, and shipped it.

The check went green. The report I sent her that evening had nothing red on it anywhere.

Green is where nearly everybody stops looking. Winston-Salem clears that check better than any city I sampled, and I still find sections hidden behind the pass there.

Nobody in that arrangement was being careless. A launch date had been promised to patients, the photographer had delivered exactly what he was asked to deliver, and the only person who understood what a hidden section was going to cost was the one who typed the line.

Have you ever fixed something by making it invisible? It works beautifully, and the working is the horrible part.

What it cost her

Two years of women arriving at consultations asking whether she had any photographs.

She had hundreds. The women who found her on a phone, which is most of them these days, met a heading and an apology instead.

The ones who never made it as far as a consultation show up nowhere at all. A woman can read every page a surgeon owns and still stop short of picking up the phone, and nothing in your diary records that she was ever there.

She never once blamed the website, because why would she? She told me she’d assumed people had gone off galleries.

I’d sat in that room and watched her show the same photographs to a nervous woman on an iPad, and I never connected the two things. Not for two years.

Every one of those consultations opened with a patient apologizing for asking, which is the detail that still bothers me, because she had driven across a city to look at something I had quietly deleted from her phone.

Would you have caught it? I had the login, the report and ten years of doing this for a living, and I didn’t.

Then I checked the other 46 trades

I’ve spent this summer going back through everything I shipped between 2019 and 2022, hunting for that line in my own stylesheets. I found it three more times.

Then I lined up all 47 trades on the mobile check, which is what I do when I want to know whether a mess is mine or everyone’s, and plastic surgeons came to rest 34 places down.

Padlock, code, writing: this trade finishes near the top on all three. Hand it a phone and it comes apart.

And 78% of everything I audit clears the same check, so nobody’s holding your trade to some private standard. Your patients carry the same phones as everybody else’s do.

Why your trade in particular

Not laziness. I’ve never met a practice owner with the spare time to be lazy.

The thing that breaks on a phone is the thing you care most about. Wide sets of paired images, a price table, a consultation form with fourteen boxes on it, all of it built by someone working on a big screen for a client who approved it on a big screen.

So which one of yours is it? I’d guess the gallery, the page you’d least like a patient to miss, and your builder had to make that page behave in a space the width of your hand.

And whoever built it ran into the same Thursday afternoon I ran into.

Somewhere in every one of these projects there’s a moment where the widest thing on the site has to survive a small screen, and the cheapest answer in the room usually wins, because the honest answer needs a day that nobody put in the quote.

Hiding is the cheapest way in the world to turn a red line green. It takes one minute, it passes every test I know, and the person paying for the website will never see what got taken away, because he’s looking at the desktop version in the meeting where he signs it off.

When did you last open your own gallery on your own phone, sitting in your own waiting room, using nothing but a thumb?

What I do differently now

Three things, and not one of them costs anything.

I open the page on an actual phone instead of a browser window I’ve dragged narrow. A dragged window lies to you. It keeps showing you things a real phone would have thrown away half an hour ago.
I ask the client which page she’d hate to lose, and I open that one first. On her site it was the gallery. On yours I’d bet it’s the same.
I never make a mobile fail go away by removing something. If a thing doesn’t fit, it stacks. If it can’t stack, it gets rebuilt, and I put that in the quote instead of hoping nobody notices.

Every plastic surgery site I build now gets opened on a real handset before I send an invoice for it. I get this wrong less often than I used to, which is a smaller thing to say than I’d like it to be.

Go and check the one page that matters

Not the homepage. Your gallery, or your procedure page, or whatever you’d fight to keep if I made you choose.

Do you know what yours looks like on a phone right now? Not how it looked in the meeting where you approved it. Right now, in your hand.

Open it after the last patient goes home. If a whole section is missing, or a polite sentence tells you to come back on a computer, someone took my Thursday afternoon shortcut on your website too.

Then ask whoever looks after it for the honest version, and listen carefully to the answer. I tell interior designers on nearly every call that a phone is almost never a reason to rebuild, and it holds here too. An afternoon is the right answer. A quote for a new website is not, and if that’s what lands in your inbox, send me the address and I’ll tell you what I’d actually change.

Your patients are on phones, and your best page is the widest thing you own. Those two facts are fighting each other on your website tonight, whether or not anyone in your office has noticed the scrap.

One promise, and I’m keeping it small on purpose. The woman who already liked you enough to open your gallery on the bus will get to the end of it.

That isn’t nothing. She was the closest one you had.