What’s the secret to great healthcare website design?

When it comes to healthcare web development, you can't afford to skip over your baseline assessment. Audit your current website and consider how things are functioning.

• What is working? What is not?
• Is your site responsive and optimized properly for smaller screens and devices?
• What does the website look like? Do the colors and structure match your brand identity?
• What types of analytics are you tracking? What do the numbers say about your site’s effectiveness?
• What tools do you have in place for users to interact? Do people use them? Do they need improvements?
• What do your patients and employees say about the website?
• How much of your content is accurate? 
• Is information easy to find?
• How is your technical SEO and local organic search rank position?
• What can you control on the site with your CMS? What is hard-coded?
• How much time and ability do you have to work on this project in-house, and how much do you have budgeted?

If you're struggling to kick off your internal site audit, we can help. Oftentimes, a third party can help provide a holistic, unbiased perspective alongside your team of subject-matter experts.

Organizational structure may determine some of your team members but taking the time to designate authority with clear roles and responsibility can save you a lot of headaches during the development process.

Ensure you meet your goals by defining:

• What web design, development, copywriting, and technical skills do you have in-house?
• How many people and how much employee time can you devote to the project?
• How much of the work do you want to outsource? How much outsourcing can you afford?
• Who are the stakeholders in your organization? Whose opinions should be consulted and at what points in the process?
• Who needs to approve content and design? What will the sign-off process look like? 
• What roles will each person on the team fill, and what does their availability do to your timeline?

In today’s environment, you can’t afford to be anything less than strategic when it comes to your healthcare marketing. The best healthcare websites use a carefully developed voice and structure designed to reach ideal patients and achieve clearly defined business goals.

A thoughtful approach ensures that you prioritize the right design, functionality, structure, and content to produce measurable results.

Your patients expect clarity, warmth, and expert care from your organization, and no less from your website. 

• Who are your ideal patients? Who are you trying to reach?
• What service lines do you want to promote most? What services are patients looking for and/or not aware that you offer?
• What concerns do your patients commonly have? What information do they need in order to select your organization or provider?
• How are they feeling when seeking out help? What are their concerns?
• How do your target patients access the Internet? 
• What types of functionality might help patients understand or become more comfortable with your services?
• What other business needs could be served through design? 

The first step in building an effective website is gaining a clear understanding of your website users (patients, referring physicians, caregivers, or loved ones). We call this persona research.

How long will your healthcare web development project take? Realistically, when can you expect to launch a redesigned website?

Because each organization’s needs, budget, and capacity are different, website project timelines can vary significantly. To build a workable schedule, be sure you consider the full scope of work and appropriate review times at each step, as well as testing time.

Review the tasks involved

• Build-in time to create SEO content and ensure HIPAA compliance. Your content has to speak effectively to your target audience, while also satisfying regulatory requirements and feeding search engine algorithms.
• As you consider design time, be practical about your approval process, and build in time for review and iteration.
• Factor in time for designing, building, and testing any custom tools and functionality you require. 
• Take technical, behind-the-scenes tasks into account. With a redesign, you need to plan time for a redirect plan, testing links, and new coding.

Reassess your bandwidth 

• Can you, in fact, do any of the tasks you defined in-house? 
• Where does it make more sense to outsource? Remember, employee time costs your organization just like paying a contractor does—in many cases, it’s more cost-effective to pay the faster expert.
• How will you plan for and enforce review time for stakeholders who need to approve various stages of design and deliverables?

Now all of your up-front work begins to pay off, and it’s time to start designing and developing your new site. When you take a strategic approach to healthcare website design, projects run more smoothly and stick more closely to deadlines. Of course, no plan perfectly anticipates every eventuality, and there will still be unexpected roadblocks and plenty of moving parts.

During your project, be sure you monitor your team’s progress and track benchmarks regularly. Establish a routine of regular check-ins and reports, and give your team permission to tell you when it looks like a deadline needs to be adjusted. Some steps have to proceed in order, but others can be worked on simultaneously. 

Although all projects are different, here are some best practices and tips we learned while working on a variety of successful healthcare website design projects:

Give wireframes appropriate priority. Spending time on wireframes upfront saves headaches and expensive rework later on. Being sure that content elements are positioned with priority and that nothing is missing before you start the time-consuming high fidelity design work or coding.

Define site architecture early. During content planning, define page structure and labels, interlinking opportunities, keyword targets, and desired audience journeys and actions so that your site is designed to meet your goals.

Streamline content production. Keep your design and content teams in sync so the copy and templates work together. Include META data, URL naming, photo specifications, and other page-level notes in content documents to streamline the production process and reduce the time required to build each page.

Build functionality testing into the timeline. Work out the details of application functionality early in the process. Make sure you allow appropriate time for testing all interactive features and making any needed improvements prior to launch.

Remember approvals. Don’t forget to loop key project stakeholders in at all major stages. Getting approvals along the way prevents rework in later stages and saves time in the long run.

Schedule enough time for thorough production. Healthcare websites tend to have a lot of pages. Make sure you include adequate time in your schedule to add your content to your new site. You’ll want to have enough time to pay special attention to detail for photos, formatting, and other page-level details. This is particularly important in healthcare websites, which tend to have a lot of pages.

Now that you have a new healthcare website, why not use it to propel your healthcare marketing to a new level? Consider your site in light of your overall marketing plan:

• Which pages make the best landing spots for ad campaigns or social media content?
• Can you link key web pages within existing email marketing workflows?
• How can you integrate the website into your social media strategy?
• What features or functions were deprioritized in phase one and might now move into consideration?
• What content might benefit from greater consideration or additional resources?
• Who/how will you keep adding more content and improving your SEO visibility?
• Which of your business goals might be met by adding to existing website content? Could you expand your vision to use the website for fundraising or media awareness?
• What are the analytics telling you?
• What ideas does your web design agency bring to the table?

Given the time and effort you put into developing your new site, you’ll want to keep it fresh and functional as long as possible. Scheduling time for routine maintenance can extend the lifespan of your website significantly—far beyond the commonly accepted three-year redesign cycle.

You’ll want to make time for:

• Handling technical updates
• Performing semi-annual audits and analytic reviews
• Making iterative improvements every month (or quarter) to keep the site updated without overwhelming your team’s workflow