The answer page pattern

One question, one page

The rule sounds restrictive and it is the reason the pattern works. A page carrying one question can be titled with that question, can answer it in the first sentence, and can be found by anybody asking it. A page carrying five questions is titled with a topic, buries each answer, and is found by nobody asking any of them.

The objection is that this produces a great many small pages. It produces a moderate number of focused pages, because the prioritisation in Module 15, Finding the questions patients actually ask has already reduced the list to the questions worth a page, and everything else becomes a section inside a treatment page.

The seven blocks

1. The question, as asked

The H1 is the question in the patient's words. Not a topic, not a keyword phrase, and not a tidied-up version that no one would say aloud.

2. The answer, in two sentences

Complete, unqualified by "it depends", and comprehensible if read on its own. If the true answer is that it depends, the two sentences say what it depends on, which is an answer.

3. The reasoning

Why that is the answer. This is where the clinic's expertise becomes visible and it is what separates the page from a paraphrase of a hundred other pages.

4. The exceptions, named

The cases where the answer is different, stated specifically rather than as a general caution. "This is different if you have had filler in the same area before" is useful. "Individual results vary" is not.

5. What to do next

One line. Sometimes that line is to book a consultation. Sometimes it is to do nothing, or to see a different kind of practitioner, and saying so is what makes the page trustworthy.

6. Related questions

Linked, not repeated. This is how the answer pages connect into the structure built in Module 09, Information architecture: the site plan.

7. Who wrote this and when it was checked

A named person with a role, and a review date. Both are visible on the page, not merely in the markup.

Deciding what deserves a page

Three tests, all of which must pass.

• Would somebody type this? If the question only makes sense as a follow-up inside a conversation, it belongs inside a treatment page.
• Does the answer need more than a paragraph? If two sentences genuinely finish it, it is an FAQ entry on an existing page.
• Is it about one thing? If answering it requires answering another question first, that other question is the page.

Applying these three rigorously usually converts a list of forty candidate questions into about twelve pages and twenty-eight FAQ entries, which is the right proportion.

Answer first, reasoning after

The instinct of anybody who knows a subject is to explain before concluding, because that is how the knowledge is organised in their own head. It is the wrong order for a reader who arrived with a question.

Say the answer. Then say why. A reader who accepts the answer stops reading, which is a success, not a failure.

This is also the construction that a search engine can present as a direct answer and that an answer engine can quote, for the reasons set out in Module 19, Writing so answer engines can quote you. As with the opening block in Module 11, the version that serves the hurried reader and the version a machine can use are the same version.

Why not a blog

A blog is organised by date, which implies that recency is the most useful thing to know about a piece of writing. For clinic answers it is not. "Does this hurt" has the same answer this year as last, and presenting it as a news item from March 2024 tells the reader it may be stale when it is not.

Dated posts also accumulate. A clinic blog run for four years contains posts contradicting each other, posts about treatments no longer offered, and posts written to fill a monthly slot. Answer pages, organised by question and revised in place, do not have this problem: there is one page per question and it is either current or it is fixed.

Maintenance and the review date

Every answer page carries a visible review date and a named reviewer. That is a promise, and it is only worth making if you keep it, so build the review into the quarterly routine in Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore rather than intending to do it.

Reviewing an answer page takes minutes: read it, check that nothing in it has changed, update the date. Where something has changed, change the page rather than adding an update note at the bottom. The page should read as though it were written today, because that is what a reader assumes.