Medical practice website design in Des Moines
Websites for independent Des Moines practices from $499 — built to compete with the health systems for attention, and tested for accessibility rather than assumed compliant.
Since 2011 · You own everything · Accessibility tested, not claimed
Last updated July 2026
A Des Moines medical practice website needs clear appointment routes, per-condition and per-service pages, contact forms that do not invite protected health information, and accessibility that has actually been tested. Independent practices also have to compete with the health systems for attention. Ours start at $499; EHR and portal integrations are quoted separately.
What a medical practice website needs that a generic business site does not
Patients arrive with a specific worry and a short attention span, usually on a phone.
Almost every patient visit to a practice website is driven by one of four things: booking or changing an appointment, checking whether you take their insurance, finding out where to go and when you are open, or researching a specific condition or procedure. A site organized around the practice — about us, our philosophy, our team — instead of around those four jobs makes every one of them harder.
The condition and procedure pages are the ones most often missing, and they are what brings new patients in. Somebody searching for a symptom or a named procedure in Des Moines is at the beginning of choosing a provider. A practice with a real page explaining that condition, in plain language, is in that consideration set. A practice whose site lists services as nine words on one page is not.
- An obvious appointment route on every page, not only on a contact page
- Insurance and payment information where people can actually find it
- A page per condition or procedure, in plain language, for the research stage
- Contact forms that explicitly do not invite symptoms or medical detail
- Accessibility tested against WCAG, not assumed
Competing with the health systems for patient attention
This is the real commercial problem for an independent practice here, and no national competitor for this search addresses it.
Central Iowa’s healthcare landscape is dominated by large systems. UnityPoint Health runs Iowa Methodist Medical Center on Pleasant Street; MercyOne Des Moines, founded in 1893, is one of the largest employers in the state with several thousand staff. Both have marketing departments, brand recognition and search visibility an independent practice cannot match on spend.
What an independent practice can beat them on is specificity and access. A system’s page about a condition is written for the whole system; yours can be written about how your practice handles it, who the patient will actually see, and how long they will wait. The systems are also structurally slow — a small practice can answer a question on its website this week that a health system will take quarters to publish.
The other advantage is the thing patients complain about most: getting a human. If your practice answers the phone, books quickly, or has a doctor who returns calls, that is a genuine differentiator against a large system — and it belongs on the site in plain words rather than as an implication.
HIPAA, patient data and your contact forms
The most common mistake on practice websites is a form that invites exactly what it should not.
A standard website contact form sends its contents by email, which is not a secure channel. A form on a medical practice site that says “tell us about your symptoms” is therefore inviting protected health information into an unprotected path, and that is a problem the practice owns, not the designer.
The correct pattern is straightforward: forms ask only for what is needed to make contact, state plainly that patients should not include medical details, and route anything clinical to a channel built for it. Where a practice wants genuine secure messaging or a patient portal, that is a separate build with real requirements, and it is quoted individually rather than folded into a starting price.
We are not your privacy officer and we do not offer a business associate arrangement as part of a standard build. What we do is avoid designing the obvious hazard into your site in the first place, which is more than most practice websites manage.
Accessibility is a real exposure in healthcare — and we test for it
Unowned by every competitor for this search, and Google’s own summary names it as table stakes.
Healthcare providers face a higher accessibility expectation than most businesses, both because of the sector’s obligations and because patients with disabilities are disproportionately likely to be the ones using the site. Most practice websites fail basic checks — contrast that people with low vision cannot read, forms without proper labels, content that cannot be reached by keyboard, images with no alternative text.
Almost every agency will tell you a site is accessible. Very few test it. We run the site against WCAG 2.1 AA checks before handover and fix what fails — contrast, heading structure, form labels, keyboard navigation, alternative text. It is included rather than sold as an add-on, and full formal compliance certification for a complex site is a separate scope we would quote honestly rather than imply.
Different specialties, genuinely different websites
A dermatology practice and a pediatric practice have almost nothing in common as web problems.
Specialty changes who is reading, why, and what they are afraid of. Pediatrics is read by a parent who wants reassurance and practical logistics. Dermatology carries a large elective component, which makes it closer to a considered consumer purchase with before-and-after expectations and pricing questions. Orthopedics is usually pain-driven and urgent, with a referral pathway behind it. Behavioral health carries privacy sensitivity that shapes every word on the page.
Those differences change the structure, the tone and the calls to action — which is why a template built for “medical” serves all of them at roughly the same middling level. It is also why we ask what you actually treat before writing anything.
Every site is built by Elisabeth Samuels and the Salterra team — a company building websites since 2011. Not a reseller, not an offshore queue. The same person who scopes your project writes the pages and hands over the logins.
That one number is enough to price a build. Send it with what the practice does and you get a figure and a timeline back in writing.
What a medical practice website costs in Des Moines
Published, and accessibility testing is included rather than sold back to you.
Up to 15 pages starts at $499. Sixteen to 50 pages starts at $999. Fifty-one or more starts at $1,499. A practice with real condition and procedure pages usually lands in the second tier, because those pages are the ones that bring patients in.
What genuinely costs more: anything wired into clinical systems. An EHR or patient-portal connection, online scheduling that writes into your practice management software, or secure patient messaging are real builds with real requirements. We build these and quote them separately — we scope it before giving you a number rather than after. Full breakdown on the pricing page.
What moves the number
- Page count — the honest driver, because every page is written and structured individually
- EHR, patient portal or scheduling-system connections — quoted individually, always
- An integration with software you already run — quoted separately, because we scope that before giving you a number rather than after
- Formal accessibility certification for a complex site — separate from the testing we include
- Content — if copy and photographs are ready it moves faster; if we write everything from scratch it takes longer
Frequently asked questions about medical web design in Des Moines
What does a medical practice website cost in Des Moines?
From $499 for up to 15 pages, $999 for 16–50, and $1,499 for 51 or more. Practices with real condition and procedure pages usually need the second tier. Anything connected to clinical systems is quoted separately.
Can you connect to our EHR or patient portal?
We build this, and it is quoted separately because the work is not predictable from a page count — we scope it before giving you a number. It is not part of a $499 build, and we would rather say that plainly than let the headline figure imply otherwise.
Is your work HIPAA compliant?
A marketing website is not usually a HIPAA system, and the honest answer is that compliance is a property of your whole operation rather than of a web page. What we do is avoid designing the common hazard in: forms that invite symptoms into email. Where you need genuine secure messaging, that is a separate build we scope and quote.
What do you mean accessibility is tested rather than claimed?
We run the finished site against WCAG 2.1 AA checks — contrast, heading structure, form labels, keyboard navigation, alternative text — and fix what fails before handover. Most agencies assert accessibility without testing. Formal certification for a complex site is a separate scope and we would quote it rather than imply it.
How do we compete with UnityPoint and MercyOne for patients?
Not on budget. On specificity and access: pages about how your practice handles a condition rather than how a system does, who the patient will actually see, and how quickly they can be seen. Large systems are slow to publish; a small practice can answer a question this week that a system takes quarters to address.
Who owns the website when it is finished?
You do. The domain is registered in your name, the hosting is opened under your billing, and any premium license is bought on your account rather than ours. If you leave there is nothing to migrate — you remove our login.
Tell us what you sell. Get your number.
Send us what your business does and roughly how many pages you think you need. You will get the number and a timeline in writing.
