Check it out.

However, there are few things to consider.  Some companies offer templates that can be customized.  These templates may belong to the webmaster, not to you as the business owner.  Some of these same companies may offer a certain amount of free content that can be customized.  This content too may belong to the webmaster.  If it is very customized at some point, it may no longer belong to the webmaster but to the writer (which in many cases is the business owner).  This would be an issue for copyright if it went to court.

If something happens to the webmaster, what happens to the site.  This is a good question for any web host or design company.  While I believe my clients owned their sites, I was always a one person show.  Certainly I had a plan for it I needed to go out of business.  I could move sites into the names of the businesses and they could then use any new webmaster or maintain the site themselves with full access.  What happened if something serious happened to me?  What if I fell off a cliff and went into a coma? What happened if I died?  My husband knew about the workings of the business and has enough web savvy to get the company I was using as a reseller host to port the sites to their own hosting accounts with the help of the clients.  Certainly, I would hope that clients would be a little patient given that it might not go as smoothly as I’d like but at that point,  probably wouldn’t be around to care.

Given how many people do this work on their own, what are their plans?  It’s a tough question to ask.  Perhaps asking what sort of assistance they have if they can’t work would be a way to start.   This way you know that your site is safe no matter what happens to the other person.  Yes, it would be hassle to have to find someone else but at least you have a working website and don’t have to start from square one.

Ownership may not be the best way for phrasing these issues, but it’s a good way to think about it.  Who are you entrusting the care of your website to? Will they love it and understand it’s importance to your business? Do they have contingencies in place if they can’t work?

Consider that if you are self-employed, you need to be making a certain amount to survive with your overhead.  Certainly insurance companies have been slow to keep up with cost of living but that doesn’t mean that acupuncture rates don’t need to go up.  It doesn’t mean you can’t ask for what you are worth.  Ultimately each practitioner can figure out what they can agree on as far as the amount they need to make per patient.  Someone seeing several patients per hour can leverage their time such they can charge a lower rate per patient than the practitioner who sees only one person per hour.

The fact that the second practitioner sees fewer patients may be a selling point as to why they charge higher rates.

If you, as a practitioner, honestly feel you are worth the money people will come in and pay you no matter what you ask.  It helps to be clear about exactly how much you think you deserve. If you don’t think you can charge enough to live on, it might help to consider why you don’t value your time.  Sometimes that discomfort is about issues around personal value that may not even be realized.

In one online conversation,  someone recommend that practitioners building a website just go to Flickr and download images for use.  Many artists use Flickr to display their images and promote themselves.  They have their images copyrighted.  It is not okay to go to Flickr and download someone else’s images and use them on your website without permission.  Love the image? Contact the artist.  Some newer artists may allow you to use the image with just a link to their website or have their name in the corner and a website link back.

Artists can watermark their images with a copyright.  The problem is that you can’t always see the details of the image when the watermark is there.  For that reason many artists don’t want to do that.   I use a service that I can have people automatically download after they have paid for an image.  I can’t watermark that image or people wouldn’t be able to download it.  This is true for a lot of artists.

Images are not that expensive to purchase.  Fotolia.com, Istockphoto.com, Dreamstime.com are all places where royalty free images can be purchased for use on a website.  Each image has a license attached.  If it says you can use it for commercial use, you can buy that and use it on your website.  If you won’t want other people using the same image, you can pay more for exclusive use.  The downside of sites like these is that the artist gets very little.   If you purchase a $10.00 item, the artist might get twenty cents.  That means they have to sell a lot of photos to make a living.  However, it is a legal use of the image and is better than searching online and stealing from someone else.

I am working on creating stock photography for acupuncturists and will sell it off this site.  I hope to keep prices low, like the stock sites but I will be able to make more money with the images.  They will be allowed on your brochures and on your website.  They will not be available for use on marketing items.  I create marketing items. I am very protective of what I do because that’s what puts food on my table.   This is true of every other artist out there.

What can an artist do if they find you’ve stolen their art? Or will they find you’ve stolen their art? Many artists do image searches online to find if their image is being used elsewhere. If they find you have done that and do not have permission, first they will send you a letter.  If that doesn’t work, they can contact your website host and complain. Many hosts will remove a site with copyright infringement.  This is particularly true of sites that are business sites rather than small personal blogs.  It is a time-consuming process to work out the details of what you need to remove in order to get your site back online.  It’s better to not have this happen in the first place.

Non artists may think this is harsh and that artists shouldn’t be so territorial.  However, images are an artist’s work.  It is what they are paid to do.  Often artists are barely making it.  The artist can’t afford to look the other way when their work is stolen.  Please use images fairly.  Not sure?  Check sites like this one for fair use.

What I didn’t get until recently, nor do many acupuncturists, is that there are people for whom acupuncture is so far out of their experience and their life that they can’t even imagine it being for them.  This wouldn’t matter except that there are a lot of them.   Those same people are often getting a little older and have lots of chronic health problems that acupuncture could help.

Educating them about how acupuncture works, doesn’t work.  After all, they know the basics of illegal drugs but that isn’t part of their experience either, really.  They’re “normal” people.  They are not a Hollywood star, an Asian immigrant, a university professor, a rich person, a well-traveled person.  They are just themselves and they may not even know the kinds of questions you would ask an acupuncturist.  They don’t know how to form a bond of trust with the medicine.

There is this story that says when the large ships that Columbus sailed to the New World on, the Natives couldn’t see them.  It wasn’t that they were invisible, but the tribes had never seen anything like it so their brain didn’t even register these ships.  I have no idea if this is true.  However, as an acupuncturist, sometimes it feels like people are often blind to the successes of acupuncture because it’s too different for them.

So how to make that connection?  Talking to people in their language is a good start.  This means that they don’t have to learn anything new to understand that acupuncture can help them. It’s not about educating them to acupuncture, but habituating them to the idea.  It’s about reaching them on an unconscious level.  That’s what I seek to do with artwork.  I’m a huge fan of having acupuncturists who see a broad cross-section of people having familiar touchstones in their offices, so that the office isn’t all about Asian beauty and Feng Shui.  Not everyone is comfortable in that setting.  Even one picture or a few magazines that speak a common language can go a long way to making the patient feel more at home.

It’s a tough line to walk to be who you are and embrace all that you are as a practitioner and still make that reach over to the person who has trouble accepting it.  If the profession is to grow then more practitioners need to offer that helping hand, to show people that acupuncture isn’t just for other people but that it can be for them.

I find it interesting when practitioners want to share their page with other practitioners.  It’s not that it’s a bad thing but is this really the best use of the page?

A Facebook page can be a quick and easy way for patients for find you.  You can offer quick tips about what’s happening at your local practice.  You can keep updates about the weather. What is happening in your community.  It’s probably far more effective for patients for the practitioner to share with local businesses than with acupuncturists from across the country.

I do follow lots of practitioners. I’m looking for acupuncture news.  I want to find news that’s unique to practitioners and see who is doing something novel. Unfortunately all this following means that everyone seems to be doing the same thing.  I find it ironic given that most practitioners strive to be unique.  While many articles are for the general public and talk about acupuncture, often these kinds of articles get tiresome for patients.  Patients want something that touches their lives.  Finding local news can be a way to engage them and get conversation going.  Conversation on the page can be very helpful in the long run, especially if the practitioner can monitor it.

Moving beyond Facebook to other social media is important only if you, as a practitioner enjoy that.  The best social media advice I ever got was to do only those things that I liked and forget about the others.

On the other hand, I realized as I was slow to find space in my new larger home that I have a lot of space and that creates its own indecision.  No longer to have to stuff what I can where I can in the closest to the most useful place, but I can plan where I want things to be organized. I can plan how I want to use the space.  It’s an unusual feeling.  This means that I have so many decisions to make about those small things, like extra light bulbs and batteries (which my husband purchases at Costco regularly) that my house still is not quite home.  But it’s getting there.

I don’t have to have things done perfectly.  There are places that will need to be re-arranged.  There are things that I might swap out at a later time when I re-organize and know where I’ll be using things most.  This is far easier to work with than the fear of something being too much.

Again there are decisions about where do I want to focus my energy.  What is it exactly that I want to do.  In an acupuncture practice it seems like we take on all of it without choice because there isn’t enough money to not do it all.  Some people find others who will work as contractors for percentages, like insurance billers.  Others hire employees.  It’s important to set up your business so that you are doing that which you love most of the time.  There will always be tasks that need to be done by you that aren’t as fun, aren’t as enjoyable.  However, really get in touch with those tasks that you dislike the most and get someone to help you with those.

I mostly eat okay.  This winter, after having a little too much extra food over the holidays I was starting back on a decent diet and limiting my intake of simple carbohydrates when we were hit by a winter storm.  At first, as it snowed outside I enjoyed watching.  I had some lunch.  I decided to treat myself to a kombucha.  As the snow continued for the next two days I found myself with the increasing urge to bake.

I grew up in a home where my mother offered baked goods on a daily basis.  They were always homemade and she used the best ingredients possible.  By best, I do not mean the most healthful, but the best ingredients that would make the best food.  At some point in my childhood she discovered that Crisco was easier than lard.  By the time I was a teenager a chocolate cake might come out of a box. I remember sitting in the kitchen watching her or at times helping with things that needed extra hands.

The snow brought that back.  After fighting the urge for most of a morning and into the late afternoon I baked some simple cookies.  And I ate.  And ate. I found that I couldn’t get enough of them.  I’m yang deficient. I was cold.  After feeling badly and wondering what was off on my hormones and how could I correct this, it occurred to me to wonder, as I shivered under covers when the power out later that I was surprised at my chill given the sugar I had eaten earlier. It then occurred to me to wonder, was the sugar craving my body’s way of trying to warm itself when there was cold outside?

This didn’t make the sugar binge okay with me, but it gave me an aha moment.  Perhaps our cultural love affair with all things sugar is really our body’s attempt to balance an imbalance. The cold, quick foods so often eaten and the heavy carbohydrates that further inhibit the spleen means that most people in my office were, to a great or lesser extent, spleen qi deficient and often spleen yang deficient.  While there are far better foods that would warm my body, sugar is a food my body has found earlier than it has found many of the other warming foods. Perhaps therein lies the craving.  Maybe my body is taking its limited knowledge of balancing and attempting to make a balance, despite the fact that sugar will cause so many other problems.

Certainly I know to avoid sugar.  Certainly I mostly do.  But sometimes something comes up with a strong craving and I give in.  This gives me another question to ask myself before giving in.  I can consider why now?  Maybe it’s the weather.  Fats are often helpful to manage sugar cravings.  Fats are also very warming.  I wonder if that’s one of the reasons they work to limit sugar cravings.  Although sometimes, fats just aren’t as good as sugar!  Oddly, my choice was peanut butter cookies, so I guess I had some of both!

First, will you actually create and maintain the website?  Lots of people think about making a website.  They may buy the domain name and look into hosting but never go any further.  If they do create a website, often it is a static site that they then forget to update when things at their practice change.  They may have people listed as being at their clinic who left years before.  Maintaining a website as well as creating one takes time.  Is that what you want to focus on?

Second, do you really know what you are doing?  Many people think they know what they are doing, but really no matter how good the template software that comes with some hosting companies, you can’t make it look as good as a professional.  The longer I’ve been doing websites, the more easily I can pin point those that are done by a hobbyist and those that are professionally done.

Third, if something goes wrong with your site, can you fix it? Do you want to take the time to fix it?  I was reading where one person was certain that an increase in visitors that came from his website was because he changed the name of his clinic.  A good webmaster could have made the clinic name work.  First they would have made sure all the special keyword tags and descriptions focused on the location of the clinic as that’s how someone would search.  Then the webmaster would have made sure there were sitemaps submitted to Google.  Finally, if google was still ignoring the site, they could have found out why–direct from Google.   Sites do get blacklisted.  It’s the domain that gets blacklisted and that can carry over to the new owner of the site.

Say, someone owned mysite.com and it was a spammy site with lots of things Google doesn’t like.  It might get blacklisted.  The spammer drops the site and moves on.  I come along with my clinic named mysite.  I find the domain name  mysite.com and buy it, having no idea of the history.  Google doesn’t know it’s changed hands and it’s going to take a long time and a lot of work  move up in the search engines because of that.  In fact, many people who make money on the web will change the domain name rather than put up that fight.  A good webmaster can think like that. They can advise and work with things like that.

If you’re doing acupuncture do you really want to spend the time learning this and checking it out?

My final issue is this. An acupuncturist trained as an acupuncturist.  A webmaster also studied and trained.  It becomes disrespectful to think that as a hobbyist you are going to do the same job as well as professional.  Both professions are art.  A poor website may not be life and death — or maybe if you have  a service that will save their life and the patient can’t find you, it CAN be. Hire out to people who do the work.   They have the time.  You pay them the money.   Focus on what you are passionate about.