In today’s digital age, it is critical for healthcare providers to have a website and online presence in order to attract and keep patients. No doctor should only rely on referrals. Eventually, sources like that are bound to run dry. As new practices open in the area, the chance of maintaining the same level of referrals can drop severely.
Competitive medical practices are likely to have well-built, professional websites, which gives prospective new patients the chance to become familiar with the doctor and their practice before they even set up an appointment.
A medical practice site, however, should go beyond referrals and attract new patients. Today, most people expect to be able to conduct their healthcare experience entirely online, whether through a doctor’s website or a patient portal. This can include anything from telehealth consultations to scheduling and payments. Clients rely on the internet to manage their healthcare as much as they rely on it to buy products.
Web Design For Healthcare and Doctor Offices
You went to medical school to become a doctor, not a web designer.
Web design takes years to master. Stay ahead of your competition, focus on your patients and let us focus on building a website that helps build your practice and gives patients the information they need.
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Benefits Of A Medical Practice Website
- Increased Number of Patients
- Easy To Access Information For Patients
- Up to Date and Current Patient Forms
- Insurance Information
- Showcase Your Medical Expertise
There are a number of benefits to having a website for your medical practice. The internet has changed how people and the community at large interact with their local businesses, including their doctors.
A website acts as a virtual office for your practice. Just as no practice has their office decorated the same, your site should also reflect your unique services and welcome clients to your practice. This can help attract new patients who are searching online for a new doctor.
Building A Healthcare Website: Design is often the first thing that is addressed when building a website. It is important that you highlight the branding that you use in your physical office, from fonts and colors, to messaging.
Setting Up Your Website: There are multiple options to choose from. You can choose to go it alone and dig and build one on your own, or choose to use a turnkey service or higher a professional to help. Building your own medical website takes time and a certain level of web development knowledge. There are turn key solutions such as PaitentPop and DoctorMultimedia which are okay if you are looking for quick cookie cutter solutions. Or you can of course use WordPress or Wix and try a hybrid solution that doesn’t require as much knowledge. You also have the option to hire a professional web development and marketing company for health care websites to make sure the final product not only looks good, but ranks well in search engines.
Types Of Websites: It is important to define the purpose. If it is simply to have contact information then you may be able to get away with something very simple and on the lower end of the budget. If you want to be found by new patients and compete against other providers in your area than you will need to invest more and go with something more complex.
Structure is incredibly important, and should be planned out in advance. An organized and clear navigation system improves a user’s experience and improves your website’s performance.
A professional site has the added benefit of boosting your reputation through great visuals and content. Patients want to know their doctor is competent and knowledgeable. Blogs and news sections allow you to showcase your expertise and inspire confidence in potential clients.
Award Winning Web Designs
for doctors who want to grow their medical practice
Websites Built Correctly
Our products are built to best standards. This means your things work the first time, every time!
Websites Built For Speed
Our sites are FAST! Our sites load on average 80% faster. This means your visitors are more likely to become patients.
Responsive Web Design
We build responsive websites that work. That means your patients can view your practice information on any device they choose.
Lead Generating Websites
We build solutions with the end result in mind, that is add patients to your medical practice.
Creating A Healthcare Practice Site
Once you have decided to create a website for your medical practice, you must then consider how you will set it up to give visitors the best experience. There are a few factors you should take into consideration.
Consider Purpose: Before you begin the designing process, you should create a list of your primary goals for using it. Are you trying to gain more clients? Allow patients easier access to their medical files?
Most medical professionals have a mixture of the two, creating goals that improve both existing clients’ experiences while drawing in new patients.
Your goals shape how your website looks and operates, so this is not a step you can or should skip. There are many ways to set up a good site for your business. You should consider its purpose and how it relates to your business. This thought process creates a brand guide for your practice.
Set Up A Medical Practice Website: There is no shortage of hosting services and site creators online. These tools make it easy to set up a basic design in minutes, although customization can take much longer. If you are comfortable doing so, you can choose from any provider and begin the process of creating your own site for your practice.
Strong Visuals: Part of a good design are visuals. This includes the right choice in fonts, color schemes, and any images featured on your pages. The right imagery takes your design from plain to engaging. Content with effective imagery tends to consistently out-perform text-only content. This especially holds true when sharing webpages on other platforms or with other patients. A website with an engaging visual design is more likely to get clicks than one without.
Just be sure not to overdo it. Too much visual content can be distracting and detract from a patient’s experience. Be strategic in what images you use and where you place them on the page for maximum impact. This is especially important if you opt for a blog as part of your digital marketing brand.
Call to action buttons and forms are also part of this process, as they are another visual element that potential patients may see when first visiting your home page. Consider how they will look on the page as you build up your design.
Clear Brand Messaging: When it comes to selecting a healthcare provider, patients have numerous options, so leave no room for interpretation in terms of your practice. Your medical web design must convey your services and define what makes your practice unique as clearly as possible.
Make it apparent what kind of medical practice you are, the services you provide, and what patients you treat. The people visiting your site are often busy, which means they do not have the time to sift through your pages to find the answers to their questions and may give up quickly if they can’t find those answers immediately.
This is another part of web design where fonts, colors, and images come into play. With fonts and colors, consistency is key. You want your website to feel unified. Also consider the type of patients you treat and use that to build your branding. For example, a general healthcare provider may opt for warm, neutral colors and formal fonts that appeal to a variety of ages and demographics, while a pediatrician may opt for playful fonts and colors.
Images can also help build your brand. You want them to be relevant to your practice. For example, if you specialize in cardiology, you might want to choose images relating to your field, including visuals such as heart diagrams or useful graphs.
We understand designing a website can be difficult. As a medical professional, you are already busy handling clients and your medical practice and might not have the time to create a professional looking design. Our team can help set it up for you, so that you can keep your focus where it matters most: your business.
Website Development For Healthcare
Medical websites must be user friendly and easy to navigate.
Patients expect content to load fast and contain the information they are looking for in an intuitive way.
Focusing on usability starts with the way a website is coded and developed.
A great user experience is intentional to programming and requires years of knowledge and expertise to accomplish.
Site Structure: Structure plays an important role in your websites visibility and usability. The way you structure it will influence your SEO and the kind of experience your patients have when they visit. By conforming to SEO best practices, you can rank and attract more potential patients. An added benefit is that conforming to SEO best practices tend to improve user experience as well, fulfilling two necessary features for you need to be profitable online.
Navigation is one feature of site structure you should especially focus on. Google tends to favor websites with clear navigation and clearly labeled landing pages. It should follow a logical structure, with a clear page hierarchy. Consider creating separate pages for each service you offer, if you offer multiple, or for each location where you practice.
It is important to plan your site structure before you start on the design or build process.
Secure Encryption: Your website is expected to be secure. (https vs http). This is even more important for those in the health care space. It is extremely important to be HIPPA compliant. In addition to having a HIPPA complaint healthcare website, you want to make sure that Google and other search engines will trust you. Secure sites tend to outrank those that are non secure in searches conducted by potential patients.
Create Valuable Content: You can take your web development and design to the next level by providing unique and valuable content for your patients. This can encourage existing patients to regularly visit you and encourage first-time visitors to click through to other content on your site. If they find you are the kind of doctor they are looking for, they are much more likely to schedule an appointment with your office or reach out to learn more about your practice.
Content creation has the added benefit of being more cost effective than traditional marketing methods. By spending more time developing valuable content, you will continue to build your brand awareness, generate more patient leads, and grow your practice’s patient retention. Content such as informative blog posts, Q&A sections, and patient reviews or testimonials can serve as a strong foundation for your content marketing strategy.
Mobile Friendly Design for Healthcare: In increasing numbers, people are using their phones or mobile devices when searching online. Mobile devices make it easy to search on the go, so it makes sense that your website should cater to mobile users. Responsive web design for healthcare is a must.
A medical site design that is responsive adjusts to fit the device’s screen size, whether it’s a computer, tablet, or smartphone. This allows visitors to interact with the content easily, without having to scroll side to side or pinch and zoom.
Responsive designs keep your site looking professional no matter the screen size. Content, menus, and other features adjust themselves so that no part is hidden or misplaced due to bad design.
In addition to the above benefits, a mobile friendly design will also boost your visibility online. Google ranks websites based on a mobile first index. You medical practice will show higher up on the list of results Google pulls when a potential patient searches for your services. The higher up your company shows on SERPs, the more likely it is that potential patients will find you.
Fast Loading Healthcare Websites: Another factor to consider when starting out should be the speed at which your content loads. People searching online tend to exit a page when it takes too long to load. This is called the bounce rate. You want to keep your bounce rate low in order to see an increase in business and patient outreach.
You can optimize your speed through various methods, including optimizing images and reducing file sizes. Files that are too large tend to cause your site to slow down as it struggles to load the contents.
Beside user experience, site speed also affects your SEO. Google uses site speed data to determine if your website is worth ranking highly on its SERPs.
Web development experts can ensure that your website’s is optimized to load fast, so you don’t lose any business to slow webpages. It is a good idea to check your site’s speed on your own using the available tools on the Internet to test loading speeds.
Accessibility: A medical practice site need to be accessible. Not only will making it accessible get your practice in front of more potential patients; it can also improve user experience for existing patients with disabilities. When you consider accessibility, you should consider your entire site, including images, videos, graphics, or any other animated and visual content used.
Consider the use of color. Make sure you have a good enough contrast to make your content easy to read. For example, black text on a white background has the highest contrast, but white text on a black background is one of the worst contrast ratios.
Large fonts help with readability. Make your font larger through coding, or include buttons that offer options to increase font size so that anyone can easily adjust the settings to their needs.
For those with visual disabilities, you must use alternative text for images and videos. Alt text should describe the image, its purpose and appearance. For videos, an audio transcription can help those with visual disabilities. Similarly, a written transcript can help those with auditory disabilities.
The added benefit to making your website more accessible is that it improves your SEO and alt-text provides the opportunity for Google to understand what your page is about, which will work toward improving your ranking.
Schema: Schema is a special structured language that helps search engines better understand what a webpage is about. This is done through a variety of data entry points. There is a special kind of schema for health care providers. It is important to make sure your website has an easy way to input schema. Schema is a must for any medical practice website.
Landing Pages: Your website is the perfect place to host your landing pages to attract new patients. Healthcare ppc campaigns need great landing pages that adhere to your brands design. We can build dedicated landing pages an to boost your patients confidence in your medical practice.
HIPAA Compliance: A medical website can have more functions than simply acting as a virtual office or driving new patients to your practice. Patients expect to be able to conduct most of their healthcare experience online from the comfort of their own homes. The biggest issue facing an online presence is HIPAA compliance.
Doctors need to ensure that patient privacy is not at risk. A well-developed HIPAA compliant website should have the necessary protections built in to make it possible for patients to securely submit forms online, access their lab results, and allow doctors to share important information with their patients. If a medical site attempts to have these features without conforming to HIPAA guidelines, it can damage your practice’s reputation and lead to hefty fines. It’s most effective for your practice when both you and your patients can trust the site is secure.
A HIPAA compliant website follows the standards for the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI), which is defined as information that can be used to identify a patient. HIPAA protects your patients and binds you to a patient-provider confidentiality contract, except for special circumstances. This protection extends to your domain, specifically all information collected and stored about your patients.
The added benefit to tightening your online security is that Google tends to favor those sites with encryptions, such as a Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) certificate. This lets visitors know they’re on a legitimate website that ensures the encryption of any transmitted data and reduces the chance that sensitive information such as credit card information will be stolen or tampered with.
An experienced web developer can make sure your website follows the correct protocols so that your website does not pose any risk to you or your patients. By adding built-in security measures, you can rest assured that your patients’ information is safe.
Interactive Features: Medical professionals are turning to this type of design feature to improve their business. In the digital era, where your patients may schedule appointments from the comfort of their homes, it is vital that you prioritize interactivity to match up with your competition. Otherwise, you might be losing business to competing healthcare specialists with a more engaging website design.
All medical websites are designed with certain goals in mind, whether those goals are to gain more patients, make it easier for existing patients to access their medical files or simply educate themselves on certain conditions and treatments. By making it engaging and interactive, you can can increase patient engagement and meet your client goals.
Interactive forms are one feature that could greatly benefit you and your patient. By allowing a potential or new patient fill out important medical information online, you make it easier on patients to fill out paperwork prior to their first visit to your office and leave time for them to discuss their health concerns with you.
Call to action buttons are a form of interactive content that allows a patient to act as soon as they are certain they want to work with your practice. These buttons can include scheduling appointments, requesting referrals, or refilling prescriptions for quick and easy access.
Patient portals are an interactive feature used by medical professionals today. Portals allow patients and doctors to easily access a patient’s medical files and history at just the click of a button. Instead of having to contact your office, a patient can easily use the portal to edit personal information, update addresses, or even check prescriptions.
When you opt to use these interactive features in your design, you improve your visitors’ experience. You receive more potential patients and improve your visibility.
Get More Patients For Your Practice
Hire A Medical Website Designer
A professional website is necessary to grow your medical practice.
Today’s healthcare system is focused on the patient, meaning more medical practices are shifting to digital marketing to reach a wider audience.
For many healthcare professionals, creating a website is outside their realm of expertise, this is where Just A Web Company can help!
An experienced and professional digital marketing agency can create a unique design catered to your practice, developed with mobile-friendly and accessible features in mind. They will also work with you and your practice to make sure your website remains optimized and secure using the best industry practices.
The team at Just a Web Company can create a solutions you need for your medical practice and make sure that you follow Google Guidelines as well as SEO, and HIPAA best practices. You want a website that performs and is secure, without sacrificing user experience. Our products are built for speed and accessibility, so you are rest assured it will stay on top of your competitors.
Whether you have an existing website or need a new one built, we can help you improve your online presence through our web design process. Contact us today and boost your marketing strategy.
Whether you have an existing website or need a new one built, we can help you improve your online presence through our web design process. Contact us today and boost your marketing strategy.