The Mobile Fix I Refused to Quote a Therapist
A therapist asked me to price a rebuild because her site was no good on phones. 85.2% of therapy sites clear that check in my audit, third of 47, and her real problem was sitting somewhere else entirely.
I won’t price a job I haven’t opened myself, even when the therapist on the phone tells me exactly what’s wrong with her own website.
That sounds like good manners. It’s a scar.
In my first year I took the diagnosis along with the deposit twice, fixed the thing the client named, sent the invoice, and left the actual problem sitting exactly where I found it. Both of those people were polite about it, which somehow made it worse. One of them sent a thank you note afterwards, and I’ve thought about that note considerably more often than I’ve thought about any of the work I’m actually proud of.
So now I open the website while we’re still talking, and a good number of those calls change shape inside two minutes.
The email
A therapist I’ll call Ruth wrote to me in February with a subject line I get most weeks. Her website was no good on phones and she wanted a price to rebuild it.
Two tidy paragraphs, a budget she’d clearly thought about, and an apology at the end for taking up my time.
She’d been told, of course. A colleague at a workshop had glanced at it, made the face, and said it wasn’t mobile friendly.
That colleague builds nothing and sells nothing. She was being kind. She was also completely wrong, and Ruth had been carrying it around for a month.
What she was actually looking at
“It goes all squashed. The writing shrinks.”
“Where are you when it does that?”
“At my desk. I pull the window in narrow to check it.”
A browser window dragged narrow on a laptop is not a phone, and I’ve stopped being surprised by how many owners test their own site that way.
So I opened it on my phone while she waited. One column, type I could read without leaning in, buttons with room around them.
When a page really does fail that check, subtlety isn’t the problem. It turns up as the desktop version shrunk down to fit, the writing lands at the size of the small print on a receipt, and the end of every line sits off the edge of the screen where you have to drag the page sideways to get at it.
Nobody drags. They leave, and they don’t feel like they made a decision, which is most of what a high bounce rate is actually made of.
85.2% of therapy websites clear that check, third of 47 across the trades I audited, and Ruth’s was one of them.
Why her trade is good at it by accident
She wanted to know what she’d done right. Nothing, and I told her so.
Whoever set her site up chose a template, and that template already knew how to stack itself into a single column when the screen got narrow. She paid for a look. The phone behavior came in the same box, free, whether she asked for it or not.
A designer somewhere solved the narrow screen problem properly, sold the solution to several thousand people at once, and every therapist who bought that template inherited the answer without ever being told what the question was.
Do you know which of the things you like about your own website you actually paid for, and which of them arrived in the box?
78% of small business sites pass the same check, so this isn’t a trade of technical geniuses. It’s a trade that mostly buys its websites from people who ship decent templates.
Which is worth knowing before you pay anyone to fix it. What would you be buying, exactly?
The question that changed the call
“So there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I didn’t say that. I said the phone isn’t what’s wrong with it.”
Then I asked her how the last three people who started with her had made contact.
They rang. All three. I said word of mouth about my own business for four years, and it was an alibi rather than an answer.
And the ones who didn’t ring? Long pause on the line, and then the sound of an owner working something out in real time.
“I suppose I don’t know about those.”
“No. And the rebuild wouldn’t have introduced you either.”
She had one more go at me, which I respected, because she pointed out that a competitor down the road has a website that makes hers look like a leaflet.
I asked her what that competitor’s beautiful website actually lets a nervous person do at eleven o’clock at night. She went and looked while I waited, and came back quieter.
The call nobody wants to make
Ringing a therapist is not like ringing a plumber. It’s a call people rehearse.
They do it from a car park on a lunch break, or they don’t do it at all, and the ones who don’t leave no trace anywhere in your practice. Surgeons lose the same people. One woman did everything except make the call, and nobody at that clinic ever counted her.
The evening a person is closest to booking is often the evening she is least able to speak to anyone about it, which is a miserable arrangement for everybody concerned, and a telephone number is the one door she cannot open without an audience.
Ruth’s homepage offered a phone number and nothing else. No boxes to type into, no way to start a conversation without saying the words out loud to a stranger at half past nine in the morning.
Realtors put a box up more often than any trade I rank and then tell me nobody ever filled it in. Ruth had the opposite arrangement, and the same silence.
24.3% of the therapy homepages I opened carry a form, and hers wasn’t one of them.
Her competition isn’t covering itself in glory either. 28% of small business homepages have one, and in her trade it’s thinner than that, which tells you how many people are quietly deciding a phone number is enough.
Is it enough for the client you’d most like to help?
What the rebuild would have bought her
A new website would have arrived looking wonderful, in a font she’d have chosen herself, with a photograph of the room instead of the chair.
It would have passed the same phone check her current one already passes, because the new template would have been built by people who solved that problem years ago and stopped mentioning it.
And it would have offered a nervous stranger the identical arrangement she has now, which is a telephone number and an invitation to say something difficult out loud to a person she’s never met.
Have you ever paid for a rebuild and then wondered, six months on, what changed? Most of the time the answer is nicer decoration around the same missing door.
What I told her to put on it
Four boxes. A name, an email address, one line for whatever she wants to say, and a button.
Not a dropdown asking what’s wrong with her. Not a date of birth. Not permission to ring her back during working hours, which is the exact thing she came to your website to avoid.
Every question you add is another second for a person to remember that it’s late, that this is embarrassing, and that she could always do it in the new year.
She won’t do it in the new year. She’ll do it on a Tuesday in March for someone else who made it easy.
The form goes on before the photographs on every therapy website I build, and no client has ever thanked me for it in the first month.
What Ruth did, and what it changed
She didn’t rebuild anything. Her site is the same site, on the same platform, with the same photograph of the same chair.
It took an afternoon of her web person’s time, and she spent about a tenth of what she’d emailed me expecting to spend.
If you want to know which half of this applies to you, I’ll open yours and tell you, the same way I opened hers.
If someone handed you Ruth’s budget in the morning, where would you spend it, and would the answer change once you knew the phone part was already handled?
So I’ll offer you what I offered Ruth, which isn’t much, because the last person who told her something about her website was wrong and certain of it.
Put four boxes on your homepage this month. I’m not going to tell you your March will be busy.
What I’ll tell you is that within a fortnight someone writes to you at an hour when your phone was off, in sentences they clearly wrote twice, about something they’ve never said out loud to anyone.
You’ll know the exact day it happens. That’s the part nobody warns you about.
