Advice needed for personal advice website

[manshack_one]

I'd like to build a website for my wife to provide online counseling to customers. Ideally people would purchase a session and be given a code for us to verify. Then the customer would have their counseling session. It's the counseling session part that I'm having a tough time with. I don't want to just have them email each other back and forth. I'm almost leaning toward using a forum concept and make the threads private to the customer's login and my wife who would basically be an admin. That way there's email notifications for the customer to know when she responds and the history of the conversation. I'm not sure how to limit the number of responses so that it's similar to what you get with a one hour session at an office based counselor. Kind of like figuring out when to let them know the meter is up. I've built some basic RIA type web apps at work and some static pages with Frontpage but that's about the extent of my web building experience so whatever we come up with needs to be pretty automated. Thanks in advance for your help.

-Robert

[kryptobs2000]

Why not a chat function, or even voicechat? That sounds alot more feasible for counseling than email. A forum method in which you're speaking sounds kind of.. hacked together if you will (no offense), it's just not a very elegant solution. If you want it done like that I'd think it would be better to just stick to email.