What a Minnesota home care website has to do

A Minnesota home care website has to do three jobs for three audiences whose needs directly conflict, and most provider sites are built for only one of them. A county case manager wants license type, waiver programs, counties served, and current capacity in about fifteen seconds. A family whose father just fell wants plain words, a photo of a real person, and one phone number. A direct support professional looking for work wants pay, shifts, and a mobile application she can finish on the bus.

Build only for the family and case managers bounce. Build only for case managers and you get a wall of acronyms that frightens families. Build for neither and you get what I see most often, which is a pretty site with a stock photo of a smiling stranger holding a cane and a contact form nobody answers.

I have built sites in this space for CityLight Home Care in Edina, Harmony Supported Living Services, and Hope Residential Care, plus adjacent providers like NuuroTherapy in Burnsville. This is what I have learned about what these sites actually have to do.

Who actually reads a home care website?

Three groups, in roughly this order of decision-making power.

County case managers, MnCHOICES assessors, hospital discharge planners, and Senior LinkAge Line or Disability Hub MN staff. These people place clients. One case manager can send you more referrals in a year than every family that ever found you on Google. They are not shopping. They have a person who needs services on Thursday and a list of providers to work through.

Families and guardians. Usually in a bad week. A hospital discharge is pending, a parent’s dementia crossed a line, an adult child with a disability is aging out of school services. They are scared, they have never bought this before, and they do not know what a waiver is.

Job applicants. Direct support professionals, PCAs and CFSS workers, home health aides, overnight staff. They visit your site more than anyone else, and almost every provider treats them as an afterthought.

The mistake is trying to serve all three with the same page. You need separate front doors and a homepage that routes people to the right one within one click.

What does a county case manager need to find in 15 seconds?

Facts, in a fixed format, without scrolling past a hero video. If a case manager has to call you to learn whether you take CADI, you have already lost to the provider whose site said so.

Put this block on the homepage and repeat it on a dedicated “For Case Managers” or “Referrals” page:

What they need	Why it matters	Where to put it
License type and number	They verify against state licensing lookups before they refer. MDH basic vs comprehensive home care, assisted living facility, or DHS 245D basic vs intensive support	Homepage footer and a referrals page, in text, not an image
Waiver and payer programs	CADI, BI, DD, CAC, Elderly Waiver, Alternative Care, MA fee-for-service, the MCOs you are contracted with, private pay	Bulleted list, exact program names
Counties served	Referrals are routed by lead agency, which is usually a county	Named list, not a map image
Ages and populations served	Adults 18+, adults 55-65, children, people with IDD, people with a brain injury, people with mental illness	One line each, plainly worded
Current capacity	The single most useful and most often missing fact	Dated line - “Accepting referrals as of March 2026”
Direct intake contact	A named person, a direct line, an email that is monitored	Above the fold, not behind a form
Service list by category	Individualized home supports, respite, homemaker, night supervision, personal supports, employment supports, 24-hour emergency assistance	Grouped under license type
Languages spoken by staff	Somali, Oromo, Amharic, Spanish, Hmong, Karen, ASL	On the referrals page and the about page

That last row does real work in the Twin Cities. A case manager placing a Somali-speaking elder in Brooklyn Park is looking specifically for a provider whose staff can talk to the family, and most agency websites never mention language capacity at all.

Two more things case managers tell me they want and rarely find. A referral form they can complete in under two minutes with their own contact information and the client’s first name only. And a downloadable one-page provider profile as a PDF, because they still forward PDFs internally and print them for staffings.

What does a family in crisis actually need?

Different words, entirely. A family does not know what 245D means, has never heard of a lead agency, and has no idea whether Medical Assistance will pay for any of this. Your job on the family path is to lower the temperature.

Write the family pages at a middle-school reading level and put the phone number everywhere. Not because families are unsophisticated, but because people under stress read badly. Short sentences, no acronyms without an immediate plain-English gloss, no paragraph longer than four lines on a phone.

The four questions every family has, in order:

1. What is it like? Describe a day. What time does staff arrive, what do they actually do, what happens if the regular caregiver is sick, who do I call at 9pm. This is the page families spend the most time on and the page almost nobody writes.
2. Who are these people? Real photographs of your actual staff, with first names and how long they have worked for you. Not stock photography. A family can tell the difference instantly, and stock photos read as a signal that you have something to hide.
3. What does it cost and who pays? Explain the difference between waiver-funded services, Medical Assistance, and private pay, and say plainly that most families do not pay out of pocket if the person qualifies for a waiver. Then tell them the first step is an assessment through their county, and that you can walk them through it. You are not quoting a price. You are removing the fear that this costs $8,000 a month.
4. What happens next? A numbered five-step path from “you call us” to “services start,” with a rough timeline. Families need to see that this is a process with an end.

Give them one obvious phone number, the same one, in the header, in the footer, and at the bottom of every family-facing page. Not three numbers for three departments. One. And make it a tel: link so it dials on a phone.

Why is the careers page often the most valuable page on the site?

Because unfilled shifts cap revenue more often than a shortage of referrals does. If you have three open CADI clients and no staff to cover them, your website’s marketing performance is irrelevant.

Direct support professional turnover has been high across the industry for years, high enough that most agencies are effectively rehiring a large share of their workforce annually just to stand still. Recruiting is not a campaign for these providers. It is a permanent operating function.

Which makes the careers page a revenue page, not an HR page. Here is what separates one that works from one that does not.

Careers page element	Weak version	What actually works
Pay	“Competitive wages”	“$18-$22/hour depending on shift and experience”
Shifts	“Various shifts available”	“Overnight awake 10pm-6am, Brooklyn Park and Maple Grove, 3 openings”
Location	“Twin Cities metro”	Named cities per opening, because people apply by commute
Application	A PDF to download, print, and email	A mobile web form, under 10 fields, under two minutes
Requirements	A wall of legal text	Three bullets - valid driver’s license, ability to pass a DHS background study, 18+
Timeline	Nothing	“We respond within 2 business days”

The PDF application is the single most common and most expensive mistake. A person applying for a $19/hour job on a phone during a break will not download a PDF, print it, fill it in, scan it, and email it. You lose most of your applicants at that step, and you never see it in any report because they never became a lead.

Post individual openings as their own pages with the city in the title. “Overnight DSP - Burnsville” gets found by people searching exactly that. A single “Careers” page listing everything gets found by nobody.

Does accessibility matter more when you serve people with disabilities?

Yes, and not only for legal reasons. If your organization exists to support people with disabilities and your website cannot be used by a screen reader, that is a credibility problem before it is a compliance problem. Guardians notice. Advocacy organizations notice. County staff notice.

The practical target is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and a short list of fixes gets most small sites most of the way there. The failures I find most often on provider sites are the same ones that dominate large-scale surveys year after year: text contrast too low to read, images without alt text, form fields with no label, and links that say “read more” with no context. All four are fixable without rebuilding anything.

Three that matter specifically in this sector. Make sure the phone number is real text and not baked into a graphic, because screen readers cannot read a phone number in an image. Caption any video, including the two-minute welcome from your director. And test the intake form with a keyboard only, no mouse, because that form is the one thing on your site someone absolutely has to complete.

I wrote a longer piece on what website accessibility actually requires of small organizations that covers the testing you can do yourself in about twenty minutes. Start there before you pay anyone for an audit.

How should the intake form work, and what should it not collect?

Short, and much less than you think. The instinct is to build a form that captures everything so intake staff do not have to make a call. Resist it.

Do not collect diagnosis, medication lists, assessment results, service authorization numbers, or anything a person’s doctor told them, through a general website form. A provider handling protected health information should not be routing that data through an ordinary form plugin into a regular email inbox. Ordinary email is not a secure channel, and most website form tools will not sign a business associate agreement with you.

Collect four things: name, phone number, county, and best time to call. Optionally a single free-text box labeled something like “Anything you want us to know before we call” — and even then, add a line under it reading “Please do not include medical details here. We will collect those securely when we speak.”

Then do intake on the phone, or inside an EHR or intake system that is built for it and covered by an agreement. That is a real vendor conversation with real cost, and for most agencies under about 40 clients the phone is genuinely the better answer.

Two design details that matter more than they should. Put the phone number directly above the form, because a meaningful share of people will call instead, and that is a better outcome for you. And show a real confirmation message that says what happens next and by when — “We call back within one business day” — rather than a generic “Thanks, we got it.”

How does local SEO work for home care in Minnesota?

Target counties before cities. This is the biggest structural difference between a home care site and a normal small business site, and most agencies get it backwards.

Waivers, lead agencies, and case management are organized by county in Minnesota. A family in Eden Prairie and a family in Bloomington are both working with Hennepin County. When a case manager or a family searches, “home care Hennepin County” and “245D provider Dakota County” carry more intent and more volume than most individual suburb searches.

Approach	Best for	Example page	Why
County pages	Case managers, waiver families	“Home care services in Hennepin County”	Matches how referrals and funding are actually organized
City pages	Private-pay families, job applicants	“Home care in Edina”	People searching for themselves think in cities, and applicants search by commute
Service pages	Everyone	“Individualized home supports”	Names the exact service a case manager is looking to fill
Population pages	Families and referrers	“Services for adults with a brain injury”	Long-tail, low competition, high intent

Build county pages for the counties you are genuinely licensed and staffed to serve, and no others. A page claiming you serve all 87 Minnesota counties is not credible and does not rank. Three honest county pages beat twenty thin ones.

Then claim and fill in your Google Business Profile with the right category, real hours, and your service area. For most home care agencies that means listing as a service-area business rather than showing your office address, since clients do not visit you. Our Google Business Profile checklist walks through the settings, and if the whole concept is new, start with what local SEO actually means in plain English.

One honest caveat: most home care referrals in Minnesota do not come from Google. They come from case managers, discharge planners, referral lines, and other providers. Search matters for private pay, for family research after your name comes up, and enormously for hiring. Do not expect a website to replace relationship-based referral. Expect it to close referrals that relationships started.

What does this cost, and when should you not spend it?

A home care or residential provider site is usually a business-tier project. Our published pricing puts a starter website at $1,800 to $3,500 over two to four weeks, and a business website at $3,500 to $9,000 over four to eight weeks. Most 245D and home care providers land in the business band because they need the case manager path, the family path, the careers path, and per-opening job pages. Hosting is separate at $10 to $50 a month, domains are $12 to $25 a year, and ongoing updates run $75 to $600 a month on a care plan or come out of staff time. Payment on most website projects is 50 percent to start and 50 percent at launch.

Now the part that argues against hiring me.

If you are a brand-new provider who has not received your license yet, do not spend $6,000 on a website. Spend $200 on a domain and a Squarespace subscription, build five pages yourself over a weekend, and put the money into staffing and your first background studies instead. Until you have a license number to publish and capacity to accept referrals, a professionally built site has nothing to say. Come back when you have both.

If you have one or two clients and you got them both from a county contact who has known you for years, your bottleneck is not your website. It is your referral relationships and your staffing. A better use of $5,000 is a recruiting budget and time in front of case managers.

And if what you actually need is a careers page and an application form, say that out loud and buy only that. A single well-built jobs section on your existing site is a far smaller project than a rebuild, and for a provider losing revenue to unfilled shifts it will pay back faster than anything else I could sell you. I would rather do the small scoped version that solves your real problem than the full build that solves a problem you do not have.

The providers who get the most out of a real build are the ones with multiple service lines, several counties, ongoing hiring, and enough referral volume that intake is a process rather than an event. If that is you, the site stops being a brochure and starts being infrastructure.

What I would fix first on an existing site

If you already have a site and a limited budget, in this order:

1. Put license type, license number, waivers accepted, counties served, and a capacity line on the homepage.
2. Replace stock photography with real photos of your staff and, with permission, your homes.
3. Build a mobile job application form and kill the PDF.
4. Cut the intake form to four fields and add “do not include medical details” guidance.
5. Write the “what a day looks like” page for families.
6. Fix contrast, alt text, and form labels.
7. Add county pages for the counties you actually serve.

Numbers one through five can usually be done in a week by whoever already updates your site. That sequencing matters more than which platform you are on.

If you want a second opinion on where your current site is leaking referrals or applicants, look at our home care website design and autism and disability services pages, or just get in touch and describe your setup. If the honest answer is that you should not spend money right now, I will tell you that.