Another thing that I would say is a major mistake are pictures of sad people.
Now, this is a really understandable mistake because when you’re a therapist you work with people who come to you with their problems, so it makes sense that when you’re thinking ‘How am I going to show people that I understand where they’re at, that I understand their struggle – I’ll put a picture of a person crying on my website’ but even though the logic makes sense, it’s a big mistake for a couple of reasons.
Let’s think about it in terms of a dentist website. When you go to a website for a dentist, do you see pictures of horrible cavities and people who obviously are in a lot of pain? No. You see people smiling with their bright white teeth, people who are happy because now their teeth are well cared for.
This is a basic principle — when we’re talking to people, what do you want to talk to them about? The end result.
We want to talk to them about where you can help them get to. We don’t want to emphasize and talk about what they’re currently experiencing (at least not through pictures. We’ll talk about the content on your website in a future post.)
Think about it this way: if a person is having a hard time and thinking about coming to a therapist and then they go to a website and they see these really heart-rending and depressing photos, it’s really discouraging and upsetting to look at.
We want people to come to your website and feel hope, because we’re trying to get them to take action and decide to actually contact you. If you show them a lot of images that are really disheartening and discouraging and make them feel worse, then they don’t have any hope. They won’t have any energy to actually take what is actually a fairly big step and reach out to someone that they don’t know and say “Hey, here’s all the stuff that’s really hard for me. Let’s talk about it.”
So you really really don’t want to make that mistake. You want to show hopeful and encouraging photos.