Dental practice websites
What the General Dental Council requires on a dental practice website, checked against its own published guidance.
Read the dental page →Two kinds of content, and only one of them is regulated
A practice website carries two different kinds of content, and only one of them is being checked by anyone outside the practice. Photographs of the waiting room, descriptions of treatments, opening hours and the general tone of the homepage are marketing. No regulator reads them, and getting them wrong is a business matter.
The part a regulator does read
Underneath that sits a smaller set of items that a professional body's own guidance names specifically: a registration number, a fee schedule, a staff page setting out who holds what qualification, a route to raise a complaint. These are the pages a patient, client or inspector can hold the practice to, because the guidance says exactly what has to appear and where.
Why the drift goes unnoticed
Nothing on the page itself checks it against the register it was copied from. A clinician leaves and the old registration number stays on the staff page. A fee changes and the previous figure stays on the price list. The design carries on looking exactly as it did the day it was built, while the fact sitting inside it has quietly stopped being true.
Working out which items on a site fall into that smaller, regulated set is the starting point for everything else on this site, and it varies by profession: a dental page, a legal page and a veterinary page each name a different set of requirements from a different body.
Find the page for your profession
Each profession has its own regulator and its own rules for what a practice website must show. Start with the one that governs yours.
Veterinary practice websites
The RCVS Practice Standards Scheme sets out what a veterinary practice website needs to show and where.
Read the veterinary page →Legal practice websites
Solicitors Regulation Authority rules on what a legal practice website must display, and how price and service information is presented.
Read the legal page →What every regulated practice site has in common
Staff pages, fees, forms and policies work the same way whichever regulator you answer to. Each guide names the requirement, the body behind it and when it was checked.
Staff pages and registration numbers
A clinician's registration number belongs on the staff page from day one, and it is the page most often left unchanged after they leave.
See the review routine →Fees and price lists
Where a website shows a fee and the practice charges something different, the published figure is the one a patient may rely on.
Read the fees guide →Forms and enquiry data
A contact form has to say what happens to a person's details and how long they are kept, under ICO guidance.
Read the forms guide →A yearly check for what actually changes
A practice website does not stay accurate on its own. A clinician joins, a fee changes, a form is updated on paper but not online, and none of it corrects itself on the page a patient or client actually reads. A routine run once a year catches what has moved, without asking anyone to reread every regulator's guidance from scratch.
What the routine is for
The annual review checklist works through a practice website section by section: the pages a regulator names, the details that change most often, and the dates attached to each check. It is built so a practice manager can run it without web experience, ticking off what is current and flagging what needs a look.
Printable, and meant to be handed over
The checklist is printable and designed to be handed to a partner or a colleague to work through on their own, without the rest of the site open beside it. Each item carries the date it should be checked against, because regulatory guidance changes and the body's own current version is what a reader should verify against.