Medical web design should be considered with a lot of seriousness because it is crucial in creating the first impression about you and your business. By just a glance, it should convince the visitors that they are on the right page, where they will get the kind of information they were looking for.
Should the visitors have a perception that they are likely not to get what they are looking for in the website, or should they get a poor user experience, they will navigate away as quickly as they landed, and this is not the best way to go if you want to use the website as a tool for growing your practice.
Presented below are some vital tips to consider for your medical web design:
Understand your position by researching your competition
Knowing what your competition is doing is vital in understanding what kind of experience patients look for when they go shopping for doctors or physicians. Research the top performing websites in your niche and take note of what is making them unique so that you can know how to angle your website and content for better performance. Do this for purposes of research only and don’t be a copycat and do everything the competition is doing.
Be careful with the photos
Not just any photo will work on a website, especially if it is a medical website. Other than the photos being the best quality possible, they have to be relevant and actual photos related to your practice or services. Users will easily tell if they are free images downloaded from the internet and this will come crushing hard on your reputation. If you can’t afford to have real photos on your website, there is no way they are going to trust you with their health.
Easy navigation
A good medical web design should have fast loading pages and an intuitive navigation. The website should be designed in a manner that the visitors will find what they are looking for in the shortest time possible. Internet users are annoyingly impatient and if your website takes forever to render or return information, they will simply go to faster websites.
Have the right content in the website
A medical website should not be just for the sake of it. Other giving you and your practice presence in the internet, it should also provide useful content to the site visitors. In addition to the basic information about your practice, it is imperative for the website to have educational resources such as articles and videos, patient forms, how to book appointment, your physical location etc. All these should be placed in easy to navigate sections of the website so that users can notice and use them as soon as they land on the website.
Optimize for search engines and mobile users
Proper medical SEO is the key to unlocking a horde of free and highly targeted traffic to your website. It is thus of great importance to ensure that the site is well optimized for higher rankings on the search engines for the targeted keywords.
Additionally, the site must also be mobile friendly. The number of mobile traffic is soon overtaking desktop traffic and it implies that if your website won’t render well on the mobile devices, then you will be missing incredible amounts of free traffic.
Use a professional web design company
With all the easy-to-use content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla, it could be tempting to design your medical website by yourself so that you save on the cost of the design. Or alternatively, you may decide to hire cheap designers to do the job for you. Just remember that cheap is always expensive in the long run, and prudence dictates that such a vital tools as your medical website should be designed by duly qualified professionals.