Let’s face it; effective website design isn’t as easy as populating a template with content. Instead, there are many essential factors that you can and should consider.
If you’re unsure what you need to think about when designing a medical or dental website, don’t worry because we have you covered. In this post, we run through the top ten essential principles of effective website design.
Let’s dive in and get started.
Identifying your primary audience
Knowing your target audience may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many websites miss the mark on this point.
If, for instance, you run a dental practice that focuses on kid’s dentistry and you fail to target young families with engaging content, whatever you do is unlikely to work.
Instead, get into the mindset of your primary audience and understand why they might visit your site.
Visual branding
When launching a new website, it pays to consider or reconsider your visual branding.
- What’s the state of your current branding?
- Is it consistent throughout your online and offline presence?
- Can it be bettered to become more visually appealing?
If you are spending money on revamping your dental website, now’s the time to nail every aspect of your branding. If you are struggling with branding, these inspiring brand-guide examples will help.
Make mobile viewing a top priority
In 2021, 54% of all website views come from mobile devices. To put it simply, If you aren’t designing your dental website with mobile devices in mind, you are down on traffic by 50% before you even start.
In marketing terms, that’s plain suicidal!
Optimise your images, text and logo for better responsiveness and see how they appear on smaller screens.
As a top tip – many website designs now come with built-in mobile-first functionality, so most of the work is done for you.
Google favours responsive websites and will use this as part of the ranking algorithm to position a site higher in the search engine.
Therefore always ask your website team if they understand adaptive design.
Don’t forget the call-to-action
A CTA is a vital part of any dental website and tells or shows the viewer what they need to do next. CTA’s are generally in the form of
- Calling xxx today for an appointment
- Scheduling a consultation or
- Finding out more about xxx
Of course, which one you choose depends upon the type of content written and what you want the reader to do next.
Consider every page on your website a chance to get more patients into your dental practice. Readers should be able to book an appointment, schedule a consultation or download an informational guide right from the website page.
A workable call-to-action makes it easy for the reader to take the next step and is one of the most important aspects of any dental website design.
Structuring for scalability
Scalability is one of the things you need to think about when designing a dental website.
While your practice may consist of only you at present, you may be considering adding a hygienist to your ranks within the coming months.
Alternatively, you might be investing in the latest CEREC technology shortly.
Either way, it pays to build your website today with one eye on tomorrow.
If your new website is no longer valid after several months, it becomes a waste of time and money. Instead, ensure your dental website is going to meet your business requirements for years to come.
Customer contact
As a dental practice, you want people to be able to contact you. Therefore it pays to make it easy for them. Ensure contact details such as email and telephone number are on every single page.
Consider using something known as the F-shaped pattern, where readers tend to look from top right to bottom left.
Placing contact details top right on your dental website means that they become easily and instantly noticeable.
Something else you need to think about when designing a website is how often you want to receive communications from your clientele. If you’re going to be contactable 24/7, you might want to consider using a chatbot.
What about security measures?
In dentistry and indeed, any medical profession, patient confidentiality is essential. So what security measures are your website design team going to put in place to ensure confidentiality remains?
Content management system
If you have had your dental website for some time, you may be happy with your existing content management system (CMS).
Alternatively, your current CMS may not allow you to do what you need it to do. While WordPress is the most popular system, every business has unique issues that need solving.
Ultimately the right CMS platform for you might not be the ideal solution for others, so shop around.
Balancing budget and requirement
A dental website with all the bells and whistles can easily set you back thousands of dollars. You may need to balance the budget you have to ensure you get those essential elements and forsake some of those non-essential requirements that are nice to have.
If you’re not sure how much a dental website costs, check out this helpful guide.
Role delegation
Once your website design is up and running, who is going to keep it active?
Remember, websites need fresh content regularly if they want to climb the search engine rankings, so who will add blogs or populate content pages over time?
You may have a team member in your dental practice who is happy to take this role on. Alternatively, the website design agency may be able to do it.
Either way, the better organised you are about who is doing what, the more streamlined your new website project will be.
Don’t forget social proof
The final aspect of any website design to consider is to add social proof. So what does this mean exactly?
Increasing social proof aids brand loyalty and build trust. So look to
- Include photos of your dental team alongside well-written bios
- Incorporate links to your company Facebook or Twitter page
- Incorporate images, write-ups or links to any influencers/celebrities who have used your services
- Include on-site media pages that link to other influential sites or media outlets where they have used or mentioned your brand.
- Add social sharing buttons to your blog detailing how many times your post has been liked or shared.
Conclusion
What to think about when designing a website isn’t as simple as deciding on the template. Instead, there are many factors you should consider if you want to achieve an effective website design. Factors that include
- Identifying your primary audience
- Being mindful of the visual branding
- Designing with mobile viewing in mind
- Including regular CTA’s
- Structuring for future scalability
- The best placement of email and contact numbers
- Ensuring the correct content management system (CMS) for your needs
- Balancing budget with requirement
- Role delegation and
- The inclusion of social proof
Here at Mediboost, we can do this for you. As a leader in patient growth for the dental and medical industry here in Australia, we use high converting website designs to help you showcase your brand and build trust.
Call us today on 1300 163 058 or schedule a meeting, and let us show you exactly what we can do.
