How Do You Create Engaging and Effective Healthcare Website Design?
When building a healthcare website, sensitivity, privacy, and accessibility are key. While you may have users of all sorts like providers and insurers, the vast majority will be patients—ranging from concerned to panicked. And depending on what you’re offering, many may be elderly. Your site needs to be easy-to-use, mobile friendly, and reassuring the whole way through. Read on to learn the best practices for healthcare website design that will help you book appointments and improve the lives of your patients.
Sayenko Design’s Approach To Healthcare Website Design
Healthcare organizations are busy and already have to be experts at so many things—why should web design be added to the plate? Our website care team will work with you to help make the perfect site, so you can focus on the patients.
We always start with a strategy that considers your users (like providers, patients, insurers, medical device makers, etc.), how they get to the site and what you want them to do. This is where we determine the types of content and pages on your site.
From there, we write content and design a site that supports those users’ journeys all the way through. We build wireframes that map out the pages, then apply visual design that brings your healthcare organization to life to create the impression you want for your visitors.
With design decided, we build custom code on top of easy-to-manage WordPress themes, which makes development fast, and management for your organization much easier once we give you the keys. We even train you on the few processes there are to know so you can build new pages, post blogs and anything else well into the future.
Regardless of what you’re offering, there’s a lot of competition for care—standing out when people search for your stuff means strong SEO. We bake this in through keyword research, optimizing your code to reduce issues, and providing content strategies for continuing to rank for your most important search terms.
Our Healthcare Website Case Studies
Wider Circle
Wider Circle connects local aging neighbors in order to empower communities to support and care for each other. We helped them improve their brand, overhauled the user experience to cater to different audiences, increased engagement through storytelling, and made sure they were compliant with accessibility standards.
Therapeutic Health Services
Therapeutic Health Services (or THS) serves thousands of men, women, children, and young adults struggling with behavioral health issues in Washington state. Their caring, sympathetic, and skilled staff support people challenged by substance use and mental health conditions.
What Types of Healthcare Websites Are There?
There are a number of different types of healthcare websites. While they may not differ widely in design, the users will vary by type of website as well as the functions of each, depending on what services they offer.
Hospitals and Clinics
This website helps patients find providers, learn about procedures, schedule appointments, pay bills, and identify healthcare tools. These websites provide essential functions to members with ease and functionality.
Nursing and Residential Care Facilities
These sites provide cost information and services for those looking to care for family members or themselves. Important elements of these sites include information about insurance and Medicare, high quality visuals of the facilities, and testimonials from current residents to help assuage concerns.
Medical Practitioners
These sites are like portfolios for practitioners that potential patients use to learn more about a provider they may be working with. They should feature some testimonials, information about their background and education, and some details to help patients make a personal connection.
Ambulatory Health Care Services
These websites provide straightforward patient services, patient resources, and importantly patient portals to manage care.
Medical Devices, Equipment, and Hospital Supplies Manufacturers
These websites are more akin to your standard marketing site, which should allow visitors to place orders, showcase products, and make it easy to contact the manufacturer.
Medical Insurance, Medical Services and Managed Care
Insurers and other service providers should function like databases, where visitors can locate things like in-network doctors, explore cost comparison tables, and make informed financial decisions. FAQs, easy-to-locate Contact information, and automations like chatbots can help with the many questions members will have to understand their benefits.
Pharmaceuticals
These sites are minimalist with access to credible sources of information about side effects and other pharmaceutical information. In addition, visitors such as doctors and patients will want to find information like testimonials and pricing information.
The Basics of Healthcare Website Storytelling
Position Your Healthcare Brand
Tell users what your healthcare proposition is and how you will deliver it to them. Create a unique positioning statement and differentiate your brand in the healthcare marketplace. Why are you unique and why should users search through your site? For guidance on positioning, check out our healthcare website design checklist.
Give Your Site a Front Desk Reception
The homepage should be as friendly as a front desk receptionist, making visitors who potentially have a great deal of anxiety feel at ease quickly. Explain what you do, why, and for whom up front. You can add to the experience by including features like a chatbot which can make the visitor feel like they’re being served right away.
Describe Your Healthcare Services Clearly
Pages that describe your healthcare and wellness services are at the consideration level of the marketing funnel. Visitors are interested in the promise made by one of your blog posts or the homepage, and want to drill down to learn exactly how they’d be taken care of and what they’d get by working with you. The goal of service pages should be to help people make an educated decision about their health needs without having to speak to someone by phone or email.
Diagnose the Right Keywords
Most people find the various kinds of care they need through online search, often through a phone. That means if you’re not showing up in the search, you’re not getting considered. Partner with a healthcare web developer who can conduct full keyword research relevant to your services so you can include those terms in your website copy and build a strategy to rank for those terms more often. This is especially relevant for location-based healthcare services, as people often search for “X service near me” and look at their maps. Get on the map, and you can get patients coming in.
Prescribe Visitors Some Helpful Resources
As a medical healthcare provider, it’s expected that you’ll have a Gray’s Anatomy’s worth of resources to prove your expertise. A resource center presents an opportunity to introduce new people to your medical brand, drive organic traffic from Google searches, and build your audience’s confidence in the medical treatments described in the content.
Scrub In Your Staff With Bios In the About Page
About pages are at the intent and evaluation level of the marketing funnel, drawing in visitors who like what you have to say, and now want to see if they like the people saying it. They’re the 2nd most popular page on any site, so the content must be top of its class. The primary goal is to build trust and accurately communicate your organization’s mission, vision, and values. Share details about the brand’s history, accreditations, and associations, and include medical staff bios complete with consistent headshots and personal stories to connect with readers. By the time they’re done reading these pages, visitors should feel confident that they know who your brand and its team are, and feel comfortable putting their health in your hands.
Patient Testimonials
This is an essential component of any healthcare service website. Whether you include videos or written stories, testimonials help humanize your organization, build trust, and reduce concerns and objections from prospective patients.
Best Practices of Healthcare Website Design
Minimalist Design & Mobile Responsive
The majority of visitors use their phone to search for medical advice, practitioners, and insurance providers, so mobile responsiveness is essential. And when designing for tiny screens, minimalism is key so they don’t get overwhelmed. Help them find the information they are looking for without wasting too much time.
Functionality
Most healthcare websites don’t just have to look good, they have to do something. Whether it’s filtering a list of providers and locations, chatting with reception, booking appointments on a calendar, logging in to review your chart, or securely handling payments, everything needs to be in working order.
Accessibility
You need to keep users with disabilities in mind. Make sure your site is robust and operable by a range of user abilities, such as blind or low-vision users. It’s vital to adopt the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) when building your site. Allow the user to adjust text sizes, and accommodate text-to-speech—including on images and videos.
Approachable, Friendly, and Attractive Design
Using high quality photos and videos that project a friendly atmosphere at your organization along with approachable language is a must to set patients at ease and keep them on your site. You can also rely on illustrations, icons, GIFs, and tool tips to create a more relaxed mood, while also informing visitors of where to go and what to do.
Security & Privacy
HIPAA compliance is a requirement in healthcare—make sure your web developer is incorporating data protection policies that will keep you compliant.
