Module 3 · Plan the site

Six pages, and the notices every page carries

Stage 2 begins. Before anything is built, you decide which pages your site has, what sits at the bottom of every one of them, and which notice pages your practice needs. By the end of this lesson Claude has written the first half of site-map.md: the page list, the menu and the shared footer.

This lesson and the next one produce one file together. site-map.md is the blueprint Module 4 builds from: every page, every section, the final words and the notices. This lesson settles the structure. The next one settles the single thing every page asks a visitor to do. Both lessons happen in the same Claude conversation, one prompt each.

A small site is not a compromise

Someone who lands on your site has usually already found you somewhere else: a directory, a referral, a search for your name. They are deciding, not browsing. The questions they need answered are few and predictable: is this the same person, do they work with someone like me, what does it cost, are they taking people, and what happens if I get in touch?

Every one of those questions is answered by six pages. The people who build therapy websites report that the common failures are the opposite of too few pages: a booking step that is missing or buried, fees hidden inside a long FAQ, and a page for every diagnosis. Start small and true. You can add a page next month in a few minutes.

The six pages every practice starts from

Three more pages come with every tree, planned now and finished in Module 5: /thank-you (where the form lands), /privacy (your website privacy policy, which names every outside service the site uses) and /im-full. That last one is hidden: it isn’t in the menu and search engines are told to skip it. It’s the page you link from your openings line on the weeks your caseload is full, with the crisis block first and a few places to look instead.

What changes for your kind of practice

Your practice-profile.md from Module 1 already says which of these you are. Claude reads it and starts from the matching tree; you only need to recognize your row.

Specialty pages: two to four, and each one has to earn its place

Ask an AI tool for “a therapy website” and it will cheerfully offer a page for every diagnosis and every town within thirty miles. Google’s own spam policies describe exactly that pattern: many near-identical pages made to rank rather than to help, including pages produced in bulk with AI. So the kit uses a test. A specialty page exists only if all five of these are true:

• People search for it by name: “couples counseling”, “postpartum anxiety”. Not “life’s challenges”.
• You center real work there: you’re trained in it, you see it often, and you’d take the client. A page for work you refer out produces calls you have to decline.
• It says something no other page says: who specifically, how the work differs, what sessions are like, who it isn’t right for. If the draft reads the same with the issue swapped, it’s one page, not two.
• It has a distinct practical detail: a different format, length, fee or first question.
• You can keep it true: every statement about your competence on it is one you’d stand behind in front of your board.

A solo clinician stops at four, and two is often right. Name each page after the issue or the service, never the result: “Couples counseling” and “Grief”, not “Relief” or “Peace”. A menu of results reads as a list of promises.

The footer every page shares

A footer is the block at the very bottom of every page. On a therapy site it does more work than on most, because some of what it holds is there for a visitor’s safety and some of it depends on your practice’s flags. Claude plans it once and every page gets it.

The notice links your flags add

This table says where each notice goes and what in your profile turns it on. It does not say what any notice must contain; that wording comes from official sources, and Claude marks each one TODO-COMPLIANCE until Module 5 or Module 6 fills it.

Any flag marked confirm or unsure gets its page planned anyway, marked TODO-COMPLIANCE, and listed as an open question. It is far easier to remove a finished page than to add one after launch.

The menu, and what to leave out

Home is reached by clicking your name at the top, so it needs no menu slot. Fees always sit at the top level, because cost is the question people most need answered. On phones, the booking button and your phone number stay visible outside the menu icon.

Have these ready before you paste the prompt

Claude will ask for real details rather than guess them, and it must not guess. Gather what you can now. Anything you don’t have yet goes into the plan in square brackets, where it stays visible until you fill it.

• Your practice name, and your name and letters exactly as you want them shown
• The phone number and email address the site will use, and your office address or "online only"
• Whether a home office address must stay private (then it never appears anywhere)
• Your fee, session length, sliding-scale policy and cancellation policy
• The insurance plans you are contracted with today, if any
• Your current openings, and today's date
• The reply window you can keep on your worst week, not your best
• Your county crisis line, if you want it in the crisis block
• Two or three colleagues you know are licensed, for the hidden /im-full page, or none
• Your directory profile links, and the license lookup page for each license you hold

Paste this into Claude

Open your project on the Code tab and start a new conversation for Stage 2. This prompt does the structure only and then waits for you. Replace the square brackets first.

Let's start Stage 2 — my site map. Follow your web-architecture skill, and read
practice-profile.md and brand-strategy.md first.

For this first part, do only these three things, then stop:

1. Propose my page tree, starting from the tree that matches my practice profile, with
   one line on the job of each page. Include /thank-you, /privacy and the hidden
   /im-full. Specialty pages: only these, and no more than four: [the issues you
   actually center your work on, or "none yet"]. No pages for towns where I don't
   have an office. No blog and no testimonials page.

2. Plan the footer every page shares, and list the notice pages my flags turn on.
   For any flag marked confirm or unsure, plan the page anyway and mark it
   TODO-COMPLIANCE. Don't write the wording of any notice yourself.

3. Propose the menu.

Show me the page tree, the footer and the menu in plain words and wait for me to
confirm or change them. Once I confirm, write them into site-map.md (sections 2 and 4
of your skill's outline) and save a snapshot. Don't write page copy yet. Nothing
about any client goes into this file.

What to check: read the proposed tree against the tables above. You should see the six-page spine (or /insurance-and-fees in place of /fees), the additions for your practice shape, /thank-you, /privacy and /im-full, and no more than four specialty pages, each one you could defend with the five-part test. The footer should hold the crisis block, your license line and the notice links your flags turned on, with TODO-COMPLIANCE wherever a flag said confirm or unsure. If anything is there you didn’t ask for, say so before you confirm. This is your plan; Claude drafts it and you decide.