A medical website is often the most critical digital aspect of any type of practice. With over 4.1 billion people using the internet on a regular basis, it’s arguably more useful to advertise your medical practice over the internet than anything else.
That’s why creating and managing a website is so important; because it’s easier to find you and read about your practice if you have an online presence. However, just having some presence on the internet isn’t enough nowadays. You need to learn how to convert your potential patients as well.
Good website design is all about balancing user functionality and design. Too little design and your website ends up looking outdated and boring. But too much design and you start to lose functionality and lose the ability to increase your conversion rates. The idea is to create a balance by decluttering your website and breaking it down into some core components.
First, ask yourself what you want your website to accomplish. Is its purpose to inform patients that there’s a medical centre near them, to advertise a new product you’re producing or is it a website for your patients to login and book appointments?
You have to imagine your core audience and how they would use your site so that you can streamline the entire process to match their requirements.
A vast majority of internet users only use their phones and tablets to access the internet. They’re portable devices that can be used anywhere, so it makes sense. However, most websites don’t conform to mobile device standards, and they look terrible when used on a smaller handheld device.
To fix this, you need to simplify your website enough so that it’s not a pain to navigate with just your fingers on a smaller screen. You may also need to reduce image quality and remove any auto-playing videos and music from your website to preserve your audience’s mobile data and make the page load faster under poor network conditions.
Lastly, we need to think about how you plan to draw your users in. Do you want them to sign up for an online account at your medical practice, or are you planning to inform them about new supplements that you offer?
This ties into the purpose of your website. If you don’t have a call to action page or button such as “Sign Up Now” or “Pre-Order Our Latest Product”, then your visitors won’t know where to go next if they’re genuinely interested in your products or services and you wont be able to increase your conversion rates and sign up new patients.
Think of it like holding your audience’s hand and guiding them through your website. It needs to be clear, concise and the design of your website can’t get in the way.
