If you are a healthcare brand, this blog is for you! Healthcare website design doesn’t have to be complicated. It may seem more difficult because you are service driven rather than product, but your website can be simple, authentic and visually stunning by leveraging these tips.
5 Crucial Tips
Tip 1
Improve the user experience. Does your website have functionality that makes it easy for users (patients, physicians, information seekers) to find what they need? For example, can patients make or edit appointments? Can physicians quickly find a way to ask for a consult? If your site is not user friendly, you may be leaving your audience frustrated. You need to consider what users come to your site for and design to this. Nothing else will matter if users can’t find what they need or are unable to complete functions online. We are a tech savvy world; more people want to interact purely online than by making a phone call. You must design based on those needs.
Tip 2
Simplify your content. In healthcare, there is often a tendency to be verbose. And while those in the industry may understand these terms, your audience of patients or other non-industry visitors do not. Simplification of content within healthcare website design can dramatically improve your readability. It can also reduce language that is unnecessary, giving you more of an opportunity to use visuals. Authentic content, from doctor bios to a blog, will make all your visitors feel more at ease when on your site. While sprucing up your content, this is also a good opportunity to look at your SEO and see what’s performing and what’s not.
Tip 3
Understand your goals. What are the main objectives of your website? To attract new clients? Provide information? Whatever your goals are, you need to actually write them down and design to them. Healthcare website design is just like any kind of design – the website has a purpose. Once you are clear on what that is, the design should complement this. But you need to know your goals first. If it’s attracting new patients then you have to do just that – “attract.” You can attract patients by using inbound marketing strategies and those can influence design.
Tip 4
Use modern, natural images. Nothing can sink healthcare website design faster than out-of-date stock images. If possible, use photos of our actual facility and doctors. This gives visitors an intimate glimpse into what it would be like to be your patient. When healthcare brands use staged stock photos the message does not translate. Be genuine in the images chosen. People have all kinds of anxieties related to healthcare; bad imagery could scare them away!
Tip 5
Keep your navigation condensed. This is one of the worst mistakes that you can make on your website. Even if you have multiple audiences, that doesn’t mean your menu needs to be bulky. Boil down your menu into actions you want visitors to take: Schedule, Ask Us, Find Us, etc. Yes, you’ll still need areas that address what you offer and who your physicians are. But a lot of the extraneous content can be repurposed for blog posts. Your blog should have categories or tags and be searchable so that users can find information. This also means you’ll have less static pages.
Every healthcare brand needs a great design. That starts with an easy to use and well designed website. With these five tips, you are on your way to an assessment. If you are ready to talk redesign, we are here to help. We’ve created websites for a variety of different healthcare brands. Drop us a line today to find out how we can optimize your site.
