Most therapists know and recognize that having a professional website for their psychotherapy practice is a crucial tool for attracting desirable clients and sustaining a thriving practice. Yet, many fears and concerns get in the way of actually creating a website. In my work with psychotherapists, some of the top concerns I hear across the board, are that therapists fear the costs associated with creating a website, and that they are not technologically savvy enough to navigate the technical aspects of creating a website.

If these are your concerns, and you already own a Mac computer, you already have all the tools you need to create your website, from scratch, with no pre-existing technological knowledge, and with no set-up costs. All you need is some patience, the willingness to try out something new, and some time in your schedule set aside on a weekly basis to work on your site.

iWeb is a program that comes with your Mac, as part of the iLife “suite” of programs. It is extremely user friendly, and in fact resembles a simple word processing program. Typing in text is very easy, as well as “dragging” pictures onto the page and positioning them at the desired location. You have a variety of prepared templates to choose from, so decisions about graphic design and visual lay-out are fairly simple.

Once you have mastered the easier aspects of this program- choosing a template, typing in text, dragging in pictures, you will be able to also add other features, such as links to other sites and to other pages on your own site.

Where is the catch, you wonder? The ease of creating your site on iWeb does come at a cost, albeit a manageable one. iWeb was originally designed by Mac for personal use, as a good and easy way for users to share personal and family photos and experiences. In order to make your iWeb-crated website more effective from a business point of view, you will need to make it friendly to search engines.

The process of Search Engine Optimization is common to all websites created in a great variety of ways. It is not unique to websites created on iWeb. However, websites that were created on iWeb need to be optimized in a particular way. Luckily, more and more businesses are using iWeb for fast, easy and affordable professional websites. This means that there is now a wealth of information available on the internet for optimizing your iWeb-based website on your own, without hiring a programmer.

If you created your website on iWeb, and are wondering about how to go about optimizing your site, consider the following:

• Look for information and help that is specific for iWeb. General optimization advice will only confuse and obscure the unique optimization needs of your site.
• Look for information and help from reputable sources. Just like all other information and advice on the internet, some of what you will find might be ethically questionable, or just purely bad advice, while other resources may offer extremely accurate and effective help.

If you need some guidance and help with creating your website on iWeb and/or optimizing it, I specialize in helping psychotherapists with the particular process of creating and optimizing their sites on iWeb. Having created a successful website for my own private practice on iWeb, I know both the wonderful ease and pleasure of working with this program, as well as some of the most important, ethical, proven and simple ways to address its optimization challenges.

To learn more about our services, email naomi@therapy-marketing.com, call 510-658-3783, or visit us at www.Therapy-Marketing.com

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