Stage one: the first conversation
Half an hour, and it is mostly about the clinic rather than the website. Which treatments you actually want more of. Who places the implants and what their training is. What your consultation looks like, whether it is charged, and how long it takes. Which practice software owns the diary. Whether you take patients who travel. And what your regulator allows you to show, because that shapes the design rather than being checked at the end.
You should leave that call knowing the scope, the price and the timescale. If a proposal arrives without a page list, it is not a proposal.
Stage two: scope and the page list
Written down before anything is designed. For a cosmetic and implant clinic that usually means a home page, a cosmetic landing page, six to ten treatment pages, clinician profiles, a results section, fees and finance, the consultation and what happens at it, a travelling patient page where relevant, contact, and the legal pages.
Treatment pages are the largest item and the one that decides the price. Agree the exact list now. Adding four more halfway through is what turns a six week build into a twelve week one.
Stage three: content, which is where projects stall
Not design. Content. Every build that runs late runs late here, and it is nearly always waiting on the practice.
What we need from you: the treatment list with from-prices and what moves them, the finance product and its approved wording, clinician biographies with registration numbers and training, and the case images with consent records attached.
What we do with it: record the clinician talking through each treatment as they would explain it to a patient in the chair, transcribe it, and edit it into pages. Ten minutes of a dentist explaining implants out loud produces better copy than any brief, and it sounds like your practice because it is your practice.
The consent audit happens at this stage too, case by case. Any image without a signed marketing consent naming it does not go on the site. That conversation is much easier now than after launch.
Stage four: design
Two or three key templates rather than every page. The home page, a treatment page and the results section, because those carry the work.
Cosmetic sites are judged on calm rather than volume. Generous space, real photography of your rooms and your team, one clear consultation action per screen, and a gallery that presents cases as evidence with captions rather than as a wall of thumbnails. Sign off the templates, not twenty individual mockups.
Stage five: build and booking
Pages are built as records, so treatments, clinicians, prices and cases are all editable fields feeding one template. That is what lets the practice change an implant price once and have it correct everywhere.
Booking is wired in parallel. Consultation types created in the practice software, exposed online, deep linked from each treatment page so the implant page opens on the implant assessment, and a booking_click event on every button so you can see which page produces enquiries. Medical history stays inside the practice software rather than being collected by the website.
Performance is a build constraint, not a later fix. Image formats, sizing and lazy loading are set as the gallery is built.
Stage six: review
You get a staging link and a checklist rather than an open invitation to comment. Clinical accuracy of every treatment page, checked by the clinician who does that treatment. Prices and finance wording. Consent references against published cases. Names, registration numbers and qualifications. Then two rounds of changes, which is enough when the content was agreed at stage three.
Stage seven: launch and the first month
Domain and hosting moved, redirects mapped from every old URL so nothing that ranked is lost, analytics and search tools connected, forms and booking tested from a phone on mobile data.
Then a recorded walkthrough of how to change a price, add a case with its consent reference, and publish a new treatment page. Fifteen minutes, kept, and worth more than a manual.
In the first month the useful questions are narrow. Which treatment pages get traffic, which produce consultation clicks, and where the gap is between clicks and completed bookings. A page with clicks and no bookings usually means no availability in the diary, not a website fault.
What makes it run late
Waiting on prices. Waiting on clinician biographies. Case images with no consent on file. Adding treatments after design. A committee reviewing copy without a decision maker. Every one of those is on the practice side, which is the honest thing to say before starting rather than after.
Where this sits
That is how we run a cosmetic dentistry and implant clinic website build, and the same stages run across the wider dental practice websites we make. Fixed price by package, with the details on pricing. Get the prices, the biographies and the consents ready and the rest moves quickly.