What a Practice Website Is, and What It Isn’t
This Part
When we say “website,” the picture that comes to mind is a home page with one big photograph and a menu across the top. Everything else sits behind that menu.
But whoever opens your site usually did not come in through the home page. They typed their question and landed straight in the middle of the very text that had their answer. They may never see your home page at all — the same page that gets most of the time and most of the money.
So What Does It Actually Look Like
A website is not a building with one door. It has several doors, each of which opens directly into a room, and different people come in through different doors.
The first site I described in the previous part has one door and a list behind it. The second site has several doors, because every answer is an entrance of its own.
What follows from this is that every text you add does not make your site more crowded; it adds a new door to it. Most of the decisions that come later ride on this one.
What a Website Is Not
Design. Change the template and it is still the same site.
The domain. A domain is the name of the building, like dentcast.ir. Buying one is not hard either, but on its own it means a name with nothing yet put behind it. Each door later gets its own number, which starts with that same name — like dentcast.ir/card.
The platform it was built on. That changes too, and nothing is lost. In chapter four we will see how.
What survives the replacement of any of these is a domain that is yours and the texts you wrote yourself, each with its own door number. That is what a practice website is.
The Number of Doors Is Not the Measure
One door, if it opens into a room somebody is looking for, is a website from day one. A hundred doors that all open onto the same repeated list are not.
What This Series Is Going to Do
From here on we move step by step, and in each part we do one piece of the work together. We learn what a patient types and how Google decides. We learn how to arrange texts so that later they fit together. We get a domain, we write the first text, we put the practice’s information in a form Google can read, and at the end we look at what happened.
At the end of the series you have something real, not a set of concepts: a domain that is yours and a first door that is genuinely open.
But that one door is not the destination, it is the first brick. We take one of them forward together because learning on a real example works. You repeat the same work later for your second door and your twentieth. If at the end you have only that one and do not know how to add the next, I have not done my job properly.
Do not worry about it not being complete, either. A lot of people never start because they think something complete has to be built first — and complete never arrives.
Build the Building From the Start, Not One Room
There are two ways. One is to build a single room that is enough for now; the other is to build a building that has space for several doors, of which you have opened one for the time being.
Today the output of both is the same, that one door. The difference shows up on the day you want the second door. In the second case you simply add it and do not touch the first. In the first case you have to move everything, which means the first door’s number changes too, and anyone who had that number written down somewhere walks into a closed door. Later we will see why this is the most expensive thing you can do to a website.
Ready-made services that hand you a finished page under their own name do not work for the same reason. The name of the building is theirs. It is the same tenancy from part one, with a smaller landlord.
And the Next Question
Suppose you have this one door, a door that opens onto a real answer.
Whether the patient stands in front of it or not is not up to you. They type their question and Google decides which door to show them. The next chapter is about the basis on which that decision is made — and none of it is a secret.