The boiler fails on a Tuesday morning. You cannot open. Patients are on their way. Somewhere in the next ten minutes you have to ring people, and somebody has to get a notice onto the website, which usually means emailing whoever built it and hoping they are at a desk. That gap, between the thing happening and the website admitting it, is the most honest test of whether your site is genuinely connected to your clinic or just sitting next to it.
What we did instead
On Thameside Podiatry's site, the announcement banner across the top of the website is controlled from Cliniko. Not from a website admin panel, not from us. From the system the clinic already logs into every single day.
Cliniko has a notice you can set under Settings, then Online bookings. It was designed for the booking page: a line of text to warn or reassure patients while they book. The site reads that notice and shows it. Aaron turns it on, types the message, saves, and about a minute later the website says it. Turn it off and the banner disappears.
What that means in practice: closing early on Friday, a practitioner off sick, a bank holiday, new appointment types available, or the boiler on a Tuesday. All of it goes up in the time it takes to type it, by whoever happens to be at reception, at nine at night if need be.
Why we did it that way: not because it was clever, but because we know what happens otherwise. A separate website login is a login that gets forgotten. The password lives on a note that gets lost, and the one person who knew it is the one on holiday. Cliniko is the one system in a clinic that absolutely everybody uses every day, and nobody forgets the password to the thing they log into every morning. Putting the control there is the difference between a feature that gets used and one that gets explained once and never touched.
The bigger point
The banner is small. The principle behind it is not, and it is the difference between a website that is decorated with your data and one that is built on it.
When your site talks to Cliniko properly, the systems your staff already know become the controls for your public face. Availability comes from your real diary, so your website is never advertising times that were booked an hour ago. Appointment types come from your actual Cliniko setup, so adding a treatment there makes it bookable on the site without a developer. And a notice typed for your booking page appears on your homepage.
Why it matters commercially: nobody is going to email their web developer about a Friday half-day. It is too small, it feels like a fuss, and the clinic just accepts the website being slightly wrong. Slightly wrong accumulates. Stale hours, an old phone number, a practitioner who left in March. Each one is small and each one teaches a patient to trust the site a bit less. The way to fix that is not discipline, it is making the correct thing take fifteen seconds in a system they are already looking at.
The honest limits
Two things worth saying plainly.
This works because Cliniko happens to offer a notice field that suits the job. It was not built to be a website content manager and it is not one. You get a title and a message. If you want to restructure a page or change a photograph, that is still a job for whoever looks after the site, and anyone telling you otherwise is overselling.
There is also a delay of about a minute, because the site is not asking Cliniko on every single page view. For a closure notice that is irrelevant. It is worth knowing so nobody stands there refreshing and assuming it is broken.
Do this today, for nothing
Ask yourself one question: if you had to close tomorrow, who puts it on the website, and how long would it actually take?
If the honest answer involves emailing someone and waiting, you have found a real gap and it is worth raising with whoever maintains your site. It is usually a small job. And whatever the website can do, ring the patients booked in tomorrow first, because the banner is for the people who have not arrived yet.
If your answer to that question was uncomfortable, that is worth twenty minutes. Bring what you would have needed to change last time something went wrong, and we will tell you what your staff could be controlling themselves.
