I'm about to hand you the exact framework I use to scope a therapist website project. All of it. The questions, the order, the reasoning behind each one.
Any web designer reading this can copy it word for word. Several probably will. I don't care, and by the end of this you'll understand why that's not me being generous — it's the whole point.
Why I'm giving away the thing I usually charge for
Here's the honest math. A big chunk of what makes a project take longer, or cost more, isn't the build. It's discovery — the part where I'm pulling your positioning, your specialty, your voice, and your practical requirements out of you one slow conversation at a time.
If you show up to a call already knowing your specialty in one clear sentence, already having thought through what a fictional case study on your site might sound like, already knowing whether you want telehealth booking separate from in-person — we skip most of that. The project moves faster. It costs less. And it's a better site, because you did the thinking instead of me guessing at it.
So instead of billing you for the hours it takes to drag that out of you, I'm handing you the questions. Sit with ChatGPT for twenty minutes before you ever get on a call with me, or anyone.
One thing to be honest about first
Everybody researching a website right now is already asking AI for help. Good. Keep doing that. But there's a difference between AI helping you think and AI handing you an answer, and this framework only works if you use it for the first one.
An AI model has no idea what your specific licensing board requires, what the therapist three blocks from you is already doing, or whether your ideal client actually searches at night on a phone. It's a genuinely excellent thinking partner. It is not a substitute for someone who's actually built inside this niche and watched what converts and what doesn't. Use it to get organized. Don't use it to skip the part where a human who knows this space looks at what you built and tells you what's missing.
The framework — four prompts, run in order
Open ChatGPT (or Claude, works the same), and run these one at a time. Don't rush to the next one until the current answer feels true, not just complete.
1. Positioning
"I'm a licensed therapist building a new website. Ask me one question at a time about: my specialty, my ideal client (be specific — not 'people with anxiety,' but who exactly, what their internal experience feels like), and how I want to sound to a stranger reading my site at night. Don't move to the next question until I've answered the current one fully."
2. Compliance-safe content
"Given my specialty [paste from above], help me draft 2-3 fictional composite client scenarios I could use on my site instead of testimonials — clearly labeled as fictional, no identifying details, but specific enough that the right person recognizes themselves. Also draft a short non-diagnostic self-assessment, 4-6 questions, relevant to my specialty."
3. Practical must-haves
"List every practical requirement my therapy website needs to function day-to-day: booking flow, whether I want telehealth vs. in-person distinction, what fields my contact form should and should not collect (I'm HIPAA-conscious — no clinical information in a web form), service area, and how a visitor should reach my practice management system if I have one."
4. Visual direction
"Based on everything above, describe the mood and visual direction I want — not just colors and fonts, but the feeling: warm vs. clinical, minimal vs. rich. Name 2-3 real websites, any industry, whose feeling I want, and a sentence on why each one works for me."
Run those four and you'll already know more about your own project than most people do walking into a first design call.
The fifth prompt
There's a fifth one — the one that compiles all of this into an actual document you can hand to a designer, formatted the way we structure every therapist project we take on, plus a compliance pass that flags anything you're still missing. That one's not in this post. It's free, but it's on the brief toolkit page, because it's worth an email address to us and worth two minutes of your time to get it right.
What happens if you take this brief somewhere else
Some of you will run this framework and hire a different designer with the finished brief in hand. That's fine. If price was always going to be the deciding factor, you were never going to be a Metamorphix client, and no amount of me guarding this framework would have changed that.
But if you run it and see how much clearer your own thinking gets in twenty minutes — that's not an accident. That's the actual process. And the fastest way to find out if it holds up under someone who's done this a hundred times is to bring the brief to the call.