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Welcome — the one surface you own
Most people who reach your website already have your name. A directory showed it to them, a colleague passed it on, or a search ended with someone typing it. By the end of this lesson you’ll know what the site is for, what you’re going to build, and the one rule this course never bends.
Hi, I’m Pete. Welcome.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years building companies, brands and websites. These days I help owners of small businesses and practices with the business and technical work around what they do best. This is the therapist edition of Evolvv’s free website course. It isn’t the general course with a few words swapped. The rules you practice under are different, the people looking for you may be having a hard week, and the most important thing I can teach you comes before you install anything.
You’re going to build your practice’s website yourself, with an AI assistant called Claude Code doing the technical work. No agency, no designer, no code to learn. If you can describe your practice in plain English, you can build its website. Every prompt in here produces a draft. You read it, change it, and decide whether it goes on your site. Where someone has already explained a step clearly on video, I’ve linked their video rather than re-recording it.
One promise about tone: this course assumes you have never opened a terminal, and it assumes nothing about your intelligence. You read research for a living. I won’t pad this.
What your website is for, and what it isn’t
You already know Psychology Today works, so here is the honest version. Directories send people. Referrals and searches end with someone typing your name. Your website is the one surface you own, and it’s where that person decides whether to get in touch.
In Heard’s 2026 survey of 1,950 therapists, 83% named referrals and word of mouth as a source of clients and 82% named online directories. “My own website” wasn’t one of the answers on offer. Heard sells bookkeeping and tax services to therapists, so read that as a vendor’s survey.
In Heard’s separate look at 500 practices’ actual spending, paying for a website tool went with a median revenue change of −1.5% over the year, slightly worse than the −0.83% baseline. That’s a correlation, not proof that websites hurt. Heard’s own heading on it reads: “Having a website isn’t predictive.”
And Psychology Today’s own sign-up page tells therapists that many members find they no longer need a website after joining. They sell the listings, but it’s the market leader’s published position.
So this course makes a narrower claim. The directory decides who sees you, and it can change that without telling you. In a controlled test run for this course’s research, eight anonymous visitors loaded the same Psychology Today search page and saw almost entirely different sets of 20 therapists: any two lists shared 0 or 1 names. Your website is the place you control, and it’s where the decision gets made after the directory has done its job.
That path, from a directory or a referral to your website to a first message, is what practitioners and clients report. The research behind this course found no clean measurement of it, and the course won’t pretend otherwise.
What you’ll build
A credible practice website
Designed, written and built with AI doing the technical work, just as good on a phone as on a laptop, and with nothing about a client ever entering an AI tool.
Your name as the logo
A wordmark set from your own name and a real photo of you. Not a lotus, not sage green, not a stock couple on a sofa.
Plain-language copy in your voice
Written in the first person: who you help, what an hour with you is like, and what happens when someone gets in touch. Written to respect your state board and your ethics code.
An honest fees page
It answers the money question plainly, including the Good Faith Estimate notice. Module 5 shows you where it goes.
A contact form that asks only what it needs
A crisis line on every page, no tracking pixels, live on your own domain, and backed up.
A repeatable update loop
Describe a change in plain English and see it live in minutes, plus a quarterly check for the things that go stale: openings, numbers, license states.
The one rule this course never bends
Before you type a single word into Claude, read this. Then read it again.
Never paste anything about a client into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any other AI tool — not a name, not a session detail, not a note, not an intake answer. That stays true unless your practice has signed a business associate agreement that covers that exact product, on that exact plan. The plan this course uses, Claude Pro, can’t have one: Anthropic offers them only on Enterprise and its API. Personal ChatGPT and Gemini accounts don’t come with one either. You don’t need any client information to build a website, so this course never asks for it.
A business associate agreement (often shortened to BAA) is a signed contract in which a technology company agrees to protect the health information it handles for your practice. No agreement, no client information. However private a chat window feels, that doesn’t change.
APA Standard 5.02(a) says psychologists “retain professional responsibility” for promotional statements they have others create; the ACA and NASW codes require your public representations to be accurate. Either way, copy an AI wrote for your site is your statement.
In practice that comes down to two habits. Any example a prompt in this course needs is made up, and the prompt says so. And every draft Claude writes gets read by you, and corrected by you, before it goes anywhere near your name.
What this course is, and what it isn’t
This course is marketing education, not legal, clinical or ethics advice. Evolvv Strategies doesn’t give legal advice. The rules for advertising a mental-health practice differ from state to state, change often, and are enforced by your licensing board, not by us. Before you publish anything described here, check your own board’s rules and your professional association’s ethics code. Many boards will answer a direct question, and many associations offer ethics consultation to their members.
Module 6 is where the rules get handled properly, against your finished site. Until then you’ll see short pointers along the lines of “this is where a rule bites; the compliance lesson has the text.” That’s deliberate. The rules are worth learning once, properly, rather than in fragments across ten modules.
How this course works
You won’t just watch and take notes. Each module ends with something real in your project folder. Most steps are a copy-paste prompt: you paste it into Claude, it does that stage of the work, and you make the decisions only you can make. In Module 1 you download the Therapist Build Kit, a set of instructions that teaches Claude the whole process, so every later prompt stays short.
Every lesson shows a time estimate. The course works better spread over a few weeks than crammed into one weekend, because you’ll want time between stages to sit with how you describe your work and to take a real photo. Nothing expires. You can stop anywhere and pick it up later.
You can say in one sentence what your website is for, and you’ve read the never-paste rule twice. Say the sentence out loud if it helps. It’s the brief for everything you build from here.
Not sure you’re the audience? This course is for licensed therapists, counselors, psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, and psychiatric prescribers in the US, with no technical background assumed. It’s honestly not worth your time if your caseload is full with a waitlist, if a platform such as Alma, Grow or Rula finds and bills all your clients, if you’re winding down your practice, or if what’s holding you back is getting credentialed rather than being seen.
Your practice is full and you already have a site. Skip to the last lesson, “Keep it working” in Module 9. The update routine and the quarterly check are the parts for you.
Nervous about the technical side? That’s the normal starting point. The setup in this module is the hardest part of the whole course, and it was written for people who have never opened a terminal.
- Directories and referrals send people. Your website is the one surface you own, and where they decide.
- This course won’t claim a website gets you clients on its own. The only spend data found no sign that it does.
- Nothing about a client ever goes into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any other AI tool. You don’t need it to build a website.
- Copy an AI wrote for your site is your statement. You read and correct every draft.
- This is marketing education, not legal, clinical or ethics advice. Module 6 handles the rules.
Watch this step
Two short ones. The first is Anthropic's own three-minute picture of how Claude Code works. The second is a clinician explaining why client information stays out of general AI tools. His details about which AI products offer which agreements are dated to early September 2026 and will change, so take the reasoning from it, not the product list. It’s from an independent creator — credited below, so go give them a follow.
How Claude Code Works
Is ChatGPT HIPAA Compliant? The Real Answer for Therapists