Case Study Archives - clinic craft

Niche case study – Skin Clinic Website

Posted on March 18, 2025May 31, 2025 by Dr Simon Wilson

For us, our new skin clinic is inside an existing medical practice. This existing practice has a website. However for clarity, differentiation and SEO reasons, we created a standalone website for the skin clinic.

We are doing this as owners for these reasons however if you are not an owner then setting up your own website is still an excellent idea for a number of reasons: You have control of design, you have control and ownership of intellectual property (check any work contract!) and it gets you familiar with working on websites. You need some basic skills, even if you have the website built for you.

Next you have to decide about self built, self built using a theme or paying to have it built. I have done all three. The first version of my vasectomy website was built from a theme and worked okay, once numbers built up a bit and I wanted to compete with the big players however I paid a decent amount of cash ($7000 four years ago) for a great looking site. I built the first version of our practice website from blank WordPress, had it re-built professionally which did not help and now run a slighly improved version of the re-built website. For our skin website I paid for it to be built from a company suggested from social media.

Image of our skin clinic GP niche website — Our new skin clinic website home page

Which option is right for you? If you have the time, creating the website, even one that uses a template like WordPress, Square or Wix will give you the best understanding of how a website works. Like knowing how to use Word or Excel, I think these are great basic skills.

For my first vasectomy website, I went to a conference, skipped most of the lectures and stayed in my room and wrote the website over a weekend!

If your project has the budget, paying for a developer to create the website can result in a good looking website, at the expense of money but also time – there will be lots of backwards and forwards with the developers reviewing, editing.

I would suggest getting going is the most important thing so champion creating a site from one of the services like WordPress/Wix/Square to get you going, get some income coming in and if needed you can pay for a better version down the track.

AI builders? Watch this space with machine learning enabled website builders – Bubble, Webflow and other that are coming along that will hopefully continue to reduce friction with building a site (although introducing platform risk – that your website is tied to their service and fees).

Niche Case Study – New Skin Clinic – domain name

Posted on February 15, 2025May 31, 2025 by Dr Simon Wilson

What are we going to call the new clinic? We want it to be obvious and we want it to be separate to the main clinic website. Why is this? I feel there is more clarity with having a stand alone website. It allows clear messaging, maybe different branding appearance, maybe different pricing structures.

So I created some names. I then checked these against a web host to see if they were available. I discarded the ones that were already in use or not available and this sheet lived in a tea room for a couple of weeks until we had a winner.

My approach is to register the domain name myself. If you are using a full service website builing service like Wix, Squarespace or other, they will also offer to register the domain name for you.

As I have a few domains, I just keep them all together at one site. I use GoDaddy but others I’m sure are great. If you name uses .com.au you will need an ABN. The ABN does not have to be directly related to the new niche website, I presume it is just to ensure you are a genuine Australian entity.

Super! We now have a name and have the domain. What to do with it? We can use the domain to create an email and a website.

For the website you need to decide if it will made for you versus crafted by you. This depends on your time, funds and inclination. I have made simple websites using WordPress themes. Design is not my strong suite however so things are functional but not the most beautiful. For the skin clinic website I paid to have it made, but with maintenance and hosting organised by myself. Other website providers will be full service – building and maintaining for you. For my vasectomy website which needs to look great and work well, I paid for building, hosting, maintaining and ongoing updates.

This website is built in WordPress, hosted at Relentless Hosting. Really it is all about what you start with, what you know a bit about.

I do think the more you control yourself the better off you are. Software people talk about platform risk – that you go too far in with one provider and all your eggs are in their basket. This also applies to whether you or the practice should build this. Again I champion you having all the control and Intellectual Property. Do check any service or tenant agreement you have with a practice about IP and who holds it.

I would caution against spending thousands on a huge website – we want a Minimum Viable Product – something to get out there soon, test the waters and see what happens.