Consultation paths for professional practices
The path from a search result to a submitted enquiry. Decided, built, and counted.
Most practices cannot say how many people enquired from their website last month. Not a bad number — no number. I read the path a stranger takes, decide what it should be, build it inside the site you already have, and make it countable.
01The path
What the path actually is
Someone looks for an estate planning attorney, an architect, an orthodontist. Your practice comes up. They open the site on a phone, look for a way to ask for a consultation, and try to send one.
I work with professional practices where the website is part of how a client decides: law firms, architecture and design-build studios, private schools and tutoring, medical and dental practices, and others like them. If a prospective client checks your site before they call, this applies to you.
That sequence either works or it does not. A site gets looked at when it is built, and again when something new is added to it. Whether a stranger can travel the whole distance, from a search result to a message you actually receive, and whether you can count any part of it, sits in between those two moments and is rarely anyone's job.
I walk that path the way a visitor meets it — on a physical phone, by keyboard, and with the software that reads a page aloud — and I never submit your form. A step nobody can operate is a step where the path ends, so that walk is part of the work rather than a service sold beside it. Walking it is not the product. It is the first day, so that what gets decided next is decided against something known rather than something assumed.
02Independence
A working form is a job done. It is not the job.
If someone already builds and maintains your site, this does not replace them. Though if you would rather I took it on, let's talk about it.
Your vendor was hired to build a site, and if the site is in good condition then they did that job. A form that submits is the last inch of the path, and it is the inch a machine can settle on its own: the field has a label, the message arrives, something counted it. Pass or fail, no judgement required.
The rest of the distance is judgement, and no tool renders it. Whether the page has earned the ask by the time it makes it. Whether the sequence is the one a person in that situation would actually follow, or only the one the site's structure happened to produce. What the page says at the moment it asks, and whether the button tells you what happens after you press it. Whether someone who is not ready to enquire today is given anything at all, or simply lost. That is craft, and twenty years of building products is what it takes to see it and then repair it.
Some practices take the written path to the vendor they already have and let them build it. That is a fair outcome and I price it knowing it happens. Three things do not travel with the document.
The decision
A vendor handed a list closes tickets. What each page should ask and when it should ask it, what the next step is for someone not ready yet, and what you want at the end of it, are not build questions.
The verification
Nobody can re-test their own work and produce a before and after about it. That is not a criticism of anyone; it is what the word independent means.
The count
Build the path with nothing counting the enquiry and you have the same problem afterward: no number, only an impression.
Your vendor can build any path. Deciding which one, and making it countable, is a different job.
03The numbers
What moving the needle looks like
Nobody can tell you in advance what your website will do next quarter. What published research can tell you is the size of the effects in play, measured across thousands of real sites. Three worth holding on to.
Half your leads never touch a form
In legal, 56.3% of tracked conversions arrive by phone rather than by form. In professional services, 52.6%. Count only form fills and you are looking at under half of what came in. Ruler Analytics, 2026, from five million tracked conversions across thirteen industries.
A tenth of a second is worth 8%
Across thirty-seven brands, improving mobile load time by 0.1 seconds lifted form submissions on lead-generation pages by 8.3%. Retail conversions moved 8.4% on the same tenth of a second. Google and Deloitte, Milliseconds Make Millions.
Three seconds is the ceiling
53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load — before the visitor has read a word about what you do. Google mobile speed research.
For where a practice like yours tends to sit: legal websites convert at an average of 7.9% and professional services at 6.1%, against 5.13% across all thirteen industries measured. From organic search alone, professional services averages 8.1%. Those are other people’s sites, and they are the frame of reference rather than a forecast.
Yours is the number that matters, so the second day of the Diagnostic does the arithmetic on it: your traffic, your enquiry count today, and what each of these movements produces at your volume. You watch the sum get done and you keep the sheet. Then the count either side of the Fix tells you whether it happened, which is the part almost nobody comes back and checks.
04The offer
The offer
One service in two stages, bought together, and two more that follow it. Every price breaks into days at $800.
Bought together
Search-to-Consultation Diagnostic and Consultation Path Fix
$1,600 to $2,400, then $2,800 to $6,000The Diagnostic walks the route a stranger takes from a search result to a submitted enquiry, decides what that route should be, and quotes the Fix. The Fix builds it inside the site you already have and makes the enquiry countable. The Diagnostic price is fixed by counting your service lines, so you know your number before you call. After it, the Fix is one figure rather than a range.
Monthly
Site Care
$800 to $1,200 per monthSomeone who reads what the path did last month and changes it. New pages get a path rather than only copy, and the count carries forward.
Separate phase
A website designed and built
$7,600 and upEvery template the practice needs, built around how someone arrives and decides rather than a brochure with a contact page bolted on. Offered after the path is repaired and never instead of it.
All three in detail, with the arithmetic.
What I will not do
- I do not promise more enquiries or more clients. I can show you the path before, the path after, and the count either side of it. What that is worth is your judgement to make, not mine to project.
- I do not dress a decision up as a measurement. Which route a page should offer, what it should ask, and when it has earned the right to ask — those are decisions with reasoning attached, and the writing says so. What was measured and what was decided are never blurred together.
- I do not hand you a list of defects and call it a plan. What is wrong with a page is the cheap half. What the path should be instead is the part you are buying, and it is a business decision before it is a build.
- I make no compliance or legal claims. Tooling output is not a legal conclusion, and I am not a lawyer.
- Page speed is lab measurement. A repeatable test under controlled conditions, not a description of what every visitor experiences.
- Every price breaks into days. Eight hundred dollars a day, everywhere, without exception. If a number looks wrong, the days are the thing to argue with.
- I change nothing while I am reading it. I never submit your form, because a test enquiry lands in front of whoever answers them. I never log in and never fetch anything behind a password, and I do not work around bot protection, because nothing collected that way can be explained to the practice it describes.
05Who
Who you are dealing with
I am David Paterni. I have spent about twenty years designing and building web and mobile interfaces. Long enough to have watched which sequences people follow and which ones they abandon, and to know that the difference is rarely the thing a tool flags. Building routes that work by keyboard, by screen reader, and one-handed on a phone has been part of that for most of it — not as a separate discipline, but because a route only some people can travel is a route that ends early.
Proof Practice is a solo practice. When you hire me, I walk the path, I decide what it should be, I write it down, and I build it. Nothing is subcontracted.
06Contact