Most articles about AHPRA's advertising rules tell you what you cannot say. The list is long. No "expert", no "leading", no patient testimonials, no before-and-after comparisons, no claims of cure, no urgency language. Read enough of these articles and you start to feel that the only safe website is no website at all.
That is not the right conclusion, but I understand how doctors arrive at it. The rules are easier to read in the negative. What is harder to find is a worked example of what a compliant medical practice website actually looks like.
So we built one.
A worked example, not a theory
The site sits at showcase.narrativedigital.com.au. It is a fictional interventional cardiologist, Dr Anika Reddy, with an obviously invalid AHPRA registration number so no one mistakes her for a real practitioner. Everything else is real. Real procedure descriptions, real condition pages, a real biography, a real blog. The kind of site we would build for an actual specialist client.
The point is not the design choices. The point is to show, concretely, what it looks like to make every section of a medical website AHPRA compliant from the ground up rather than retrofitted as an afterthought.
You can browse the whole site. You can switch between four different visual themes (clinical, editorial, warm, premium) and three different layout structures (classic, narrative, masthead) using the widget in the bottom right corner. Every variant is built to the same compliance baseline.
Where compliance shows up
A few things to look at as you click through.
The home page does not call her an expert. It says she is an interventional cardiologist. That is a verifiable specialist title for someone with the relevant AHPRA registration, and the site uses it once, factually, without superlatives. There is no "leading" or "renowned" or "highly experienced". Patients can decide for themselves what experience looks like by reading her credentials.
The procedures pages put risk and benefit on the same page. When you read about coronary angiography or stent placement, the description includes what the procedure is for, what it involves, and what the recognised risks are. AHPRA is clear that any discussion of a treatment must include balanced information. The structure of these pages makes that automatic.
There are no patient testimonials. Nowhere on the site does a patient quote appear. AHPRA prohibits testimonials in advertising for regulated health services, and that prohibition catches a lot of practitioners by surprise because it includes Google reviews displayed on your own site, screenshots of patient feedback, and quoted comments. The showcase has none of these. What it has instead is professional content that does the trust-building work that testimonials would otherwise do.
The about page does not list "outcomes". It lists qualifications, training, hospital appointments, professional memberships, and research interests. All of these are objectively verifiable. None of them imply that the patient will receive a particular result.
The blog posts are educational, not promotional. They explain conditions, describe procedures, and discuss research. None of them encourage indiscriminate use of services. None of them include urgency language or imply that delay is dangerous in a way designed to drive bookings.
Why "compliant by design" matters
The alternative to this approach is what I see most often in practice. A doctor builds a website using a generic template, then a year later receives a notification from AHPRA or a colleague pointing out that the testimonials need to come down, the word "specialist" needs to be qualified, the procedure pages need risk disclosures added. The retrofit costs more than building it right the first time, and it leaves a window of exposure in between.
A compliant-by-design site avoids that. Every template choice, every page structure, every default piece of copy assumes the rules and works within them. When the doctor adds a new procedure page, the structure already prompts for risks alongside benefits. When the practice adds a new team member, the about page template asks for qualifications rather than achievements. The compliance is not a separate review step. It is built into the way content is added.
That is what the showcase demonstrates. Not a particular look, but a particular discipline.
What this is not
This is not a website-building service. We are a reputation management and search business. Most of our clients come to us because their search results are not what they want them to be, or because their professional visibility is lower than it should be. A compliant practice website is one of the foundations of that work, but it is the foundation, not the building.
The showcase exists because doctors keep asking us what compliance actually looks like in practice, and we got tired of describing it. Easier to show you.
Have a look
Click through, switch the themes, browse the procedure pages and the blog. Notice what is there and what is not. If something looks unfamiliar, that is probably the point.
showcase.narrativedigital.com.au
If you would like a frank look at how your own practice site compares, against AHPRA rules and against the search visibility of your colleagues, get in touch. We will tell you the truth, and the conversation is confidential.