This workshop grew out of a pattern I kept seeing from the other side of the counselling room: practitioners who are brilliant clinicians but get stuck the moment they try to put themselves online. I've built websites, booking systems, and admin tools for therapists for years, and I'm also a BACP-accredited counsellor myself — so I see this problem from both directions. Most website advice out there is either too generic (written for businesses in general, not therapy specifically) or too technical (written for developers, not practitioners). This session sits in the gap between those two.

Together we'll cover what actually needs to be on a counselling website — beyond the obvious "about me" page — including the legal and GDPR essentials that are easy to miss when you're collecting enquiries from people in distress. We'll compare the main platform options (Squarespace, Wix, and the growing cottage industry of therapist-specific website builders), and be honest about what each one is genuinely good at and where they fall short. We'll also look at how your website works alongside directories like Counselling Directory and BACP, how to turn visits into actual bookings without losing the human judgement that matters in this profession, and the ongoing costs and pitfalls that catch people out once the site is live.

What makes this different is that it's built by someone who has done the coding, the compliance work, and the client-facing counselling all myself — so the advice isn't theoretical. It comes from having actually migrated therapist sites, tracked what gets enquiries versus what gets ignored, and sat with the ethical questions that come up when your "shop window" is also where someone in crisis might first reach out for help.

Description supplied by the event organiser.