When you want to discover a new brand, you do so by navigating through their website, isn’t it? The audience will now know everything about you from the website you’ve made. This is the reason why web design is given so much importance today. When it comes to healthcare website design and development, you need to know how the medical industry works. Based on that, you plan your digital marketing strategies.
While some of the tips given below are universal to any website, some cater specially to healthcare organizations:
1. User-Friendly and Engaging Interface
UI/UX is the most basic part of website design and development. An interface is user-friendly when you can easily navigate everything on the website. This includes your primary services and other site information like company profile and blog. The easier you make it for the user to go through your web pages, the more engaging it gets.
Anyone navigating a healthcare site is usually interested in its services at the moment. It should be extremely easy for the user to understand the structure of the site. They should be able to understand where to find which services or information they’re looking for.
2. Highly Responsive Web Pages
At least half the internet users out there will be using their mobile phones to search and navigate your website. Others will be using either laptops, desktops, or tablets. Your website should open properly on every kind of screen size and ratio.
A responsive website will open as quickly on a mobile phone as it does on a laptop or tablet. A good website design and development agency will be known for providing you with mobile-friendly designs for your site.
3. Highlight Information About Service Providers
From a healthcare organization, the services required by a user would be mostly from a doctor or a nurse. Both need to be highly qualified and experienced in their area of work. This ensures that the patient can trust them for his/her treatment.
Thus, a medical website should have a separate page to provide information on all the staff members working directly with the patient. Whether you’re a hospital or provide healthcare services at the doorstep, this page is important for both organizations.
4. Keep Patient Testimonials
Most service-providing websites display few client testimonials on their home page or the service detail page. You can either have it in written form or even better in video form. You can also show “before/after” images here. These images portray the patient’s health before he started treatment and the image after the treatment was successfully over.
5. Educate Your Audience through Blogs and Videos
Healthcare is a very delicate and important matter for all of us. Usually these days, every website does have a blog section for SEO purposes. A healthcare-related website additionally needs to educate its audience. Mostly, it is regarding leading a healthy lifestyle or choosing the right healthcare services for certain problems. For this purpose, you can also have a vlog section. Educational healthcare videos prove to be an excellent way of educating your patients.
6. Highlight All Your Services on the Home Page
Usually, a home page is meant to summarize everything that your website provides. In order to make navigation easy for the user, you keep snippets on the home page. A snippet is a small extract of what is there on a web page. Add a link below it that leads the user to the other pages on our site. These pages are additionally accessible from the main menu or footer. So, it applies to a service page, staff page, about us page, contact page, and blog. This leaves the user with 2 places on the home page from where he/she can go to the next one.
7. Contact Forms for Generating Leads
Like I said above, most users navigating through a healthcare website are interested in getting the services right away. Most healthcare services are needed on an urgent basis. This applies to booking an appointment at a clinic as well as hiring a nurse to come home for a week. So, it should be extremely easy for the user to contact you right away.
A well-designed lead generation form has become an important part of website design and development. It will take the least information from the user. This includes only what is absolutely necessary and makes him/her type as little as possible. When it is easy for the customer to contact you, you tend to generate more leads.
8. Provide Patients with Easy Access to Data
Some healthcare sites allow patients to create their accounts or access their medical database from the cloud. Data access is important for both patients and doctors. Thus, if your site is being used to access important medical records of a patient, the process needs to be smooth and user-friendly. You need to ask your developer to optimize this feature in the best possible manner.
9. Optimize Your Website for Speed
Ideally, optimizing websites for speed is part of any website design and development service. A user will not wait for more than 3 seconds for a site to load. Multimedia content can make your website heavy. Thus, you need to optimize it in a way that reduces the time it takes to load. Clean code, optimized files, and the presence of only the right plugins will ensure the proper optimization of your website.
Other Things to Keep in Mind
After the outbreak of the pandemic, the importance of accessing healthcare services online has increased drastically. Having an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly site is crucial to all. However, for one that provides medical services and information, smooth and fast functioning is also of utmost importance.
You need to ensure that your website has unique features, smooth functionality, and enough guidance to gain trust in your potential users. Thus, you need to hire the best website design and development agency. The easier you make it for a patient to access your services, the better will be your brand name. This in turn brings in more users.
