What are the must-haves for medicine websites?
Fundamentally, an online medicine provider ‘s website should accomplish two goals. It should communicate with and serve current patients and prospective patients.
If you already have enough patients, you usually don’t need as large of a website or as much information on it in comparison to a practice requiring more patients.
We’ll look at the essential ingredients that every online medicine provider or provider should have on its website.
A CMS or Website Builder Software
This is something visitors won’t see. CMS means content management system.
Preferably, it should be an open-source content management system which allows anyone to learn to operate a website like you run word processing software.
This allows you to avoid hiring a web developer any time you want to change your website.vYou can just go into a screen that looks like a Microsoft Word document, open and updates the site.
This saves much time and money. An open-source for CMS means that it is royalty free and thus no licensing fee is required.
This includes WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal as samples of this kind of software.
Clean Mobile Design
The most significant mistake we all make in communication, including web communication, is trying to say too much.
We see countless healthcare website pages that are chock-a-block with endless seas of text.
Remember the web is a scanning medium as much as it is a reading medium. Don’t make people work too hard and read too much on your web pages.
Also, strive for what’s called a mobile responsive website. This means that the special coding allows the site to be readable on smaller screens such as computer tablets and smartphones.
You can achieve mobile responsiveness through a particular type of computer coding called responsive design. This is where you need an experienced web developer for at least one time.
A good designer will know exactly how to incorporate responsive design into your online medicine site.
Responsive design is essential because research tells us that more than half of visitors to healthcare websites are on smartphones.
Simple Address that’s Easy to Remember
We humans can’t always drop what we’re doing wherever we are and look at a website, even when we want to.
Many times we get around visiting website hours or days after we’ve heard about it, but often we can’t remember the address.
So avoid the temptation to focus too much on using your personal or practice name in your website address.
Instead, pick an address that’s catchy, memorable, and easy for all patients to spell and remember.
Patient Talk
Use plain language that speaks to patients, not other doctors.
How often has someone accused you of being too precise? It doesn’t happen, right? People want straight facts, and they want them fast and easy to understand.
We don’t talk, email, or write greeting card notes to our family members in the same kind of writing style you find in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
So, use conversational language on your website and your website visitors will thank you for it. Read more on this website.
Contact and Location Information
You want patients to find you. Make it easy for them by providing addresses and phone numbers for all office locations on the website.
Be sure also to make the phone numbers clickable on your web pages for smartphone users. Include a Google map of your locations. It will help make the site easier to find in the google search and give patients driving directions.
Dynamic Visitors Website
There are a couple of different ways you can start to collect information about your users so that you can personalize their experience with your website applications.
You can imagine a user coming to your website anonymously. So, they’re not logged in, and you don’t know who they are.
But as they start to engage with your website, you can begin to fill out a profile of who they are and what their interests are.
Communication With Registered Patients
Once you’ve gotten them to sign up, you can start to tailor their experience.
You already know a lot about them; maybe they’ve signed up for a personal diet reminder or getting recipes sent to them via email.
All of these things can help your patients with higher degrees of compliance with the recommendations from their health care provider.
That can increase efficiency.
Personalizing Online Medicine Experience With Content
An increasingly important component of that great experience is the ability to personalize content and tailor it down to the individual consumer or patient.
Personalization can be categorized into three groups: behavioral, demographic, and interest based.
Behavioral might be those interactions with the website or application. This includes what they’re clicking on, what they’re liking or commenting, or even rating content if you’re allowing it.
Demographic-based might be maybe they’ve shared their location, or perhaps they’ve selected a specific language. You might know if they filled out a profile and provided some further information like gender.
An interest-based goes back to the idea of signing up for an e-newsletter on a specific category.
You can also track the types of content that they’re viewing and engaging.
Self-selected Personalization
An example of a website that is doing this types of personalization is Memorial Sloan Kettering. Right from their homepage, they allow users to self-select.
Just by making that selection, you can start to tailor the rest of the content that your visitor is seeing. Based on that selection, you can see on the bottom they’ve also got a location selector.
So you might be able to start to tailor content that way too by showing locations nearby.
They take it a step further and does an auto location detection. So if you go to their homepage and click the find a facility, you immediately see all the facilities in your area every time you come back to the site.
You can share information based on location very quickly.
Create Your Website Now
Creating a medical website is a tricky task, not least of which because it has concerns around PHA and other electronic health information.
Having an online medicine patient portal is not the same thing as having a personalized web experience. Excellent patient experience, and indeed any good online experience, starts with the website itself. These are the basic ingredients for all medicine websites.
For more information and web tips, check out these web design tips.