Uncommon Conversations

Several people have asked if TherapySites is a good platform from which to develop a website. So I thought I’d take it for a spin and see what it has to offer.

TherapySites does a good job of allowing a novice to create a professional-looking site. In fact if you wanted, you could create an entire site in less than two hours, if you wanted to keep most of their default settings. You can, to a limited degree, customize the site to fit your needs, though, for a beginner I suspect it could be confusing or cumbersome to make changes to the site design and text. But that flexibility is there if you’re willing to learn how to do it.

They are now bundling their service with Psychology Today, where you get six months free when you create a site with them. This would have been much more attractive in the past than it is today – almost everyone I’ve spoken to around the country is getting far fewer referrals from Psychology Today in 2009 than they have gotten in the past. I’m not sure if it’s because of the sheer numbers of therapists on the site, but it’s clear that it’s not working as well as it once did.

My biggest complaint with this service has to do with accessing HTML, the meta tags and the price. Re HTML, it doesn’t appear that you can edit the actual HTML, or add additional HTML code on your own, which could limit adding advanced features in the future. Re meta tags, they strongly encourage you not to mess with them. Furthermore, they write:

Your pages can have an internal title, description, and keywords. These are not visible content. They are only used by search engines, and are never actually shown to anyone. They are unlikely to move your site up in the search results by any significant amount. If you want to change the visible content of your site, then you are in the wrong place.

In fact, the title tag of every page IS visible to people at the top of the browser window, and almost every expert I’ve studied with has said that the Title Tag does influence search engine results.

Re price, they advertise that you can create a site for “only” $59 a month. Only? This is a VERY expensive service. That’s over $700 a year. Most web hosting services, even those that include a website builder within them, charge no more than $300 a year. And some, like GoDaddy and Yahoo, are less than $150 a year. So I’m not sure how they can justify this price other than the fact that they are appealing to novices who don’t know any better.

In sum, TherapySites has some good features if you don’t want to get your hands dirty or spend too much time creating or maintaining your site. But feature for feature, you will have a greater ability to customize – at a lower price – with several competing services.

With any template-driven website building services,
these are the key criteria to look for:

1. can you change the design on your own? Text, graphics, photos?
2. can you add as many pages as you like, to allow for future expansion?
3. can you register your own domain name?
4. how accessible is the support? Can you get a live person on the line when you need help?
5. can you access the meta tags or other HTML programming, for search engine optimization or adding other advanced features?