The websites have become a very important part of any business’s brand identity. Especially these days the trends and people’s preferences have been changed. People now a day prefer to start searching online before they make any decision. For the healthcare sector the website is even more important, the rise of smartphones, smart gadgets, wearable technologies and digital experience changed the market trend. Hence the digital experience have become more important than ever before. A healthcare website can be used to build a great brand image and to offer multiple features which can help healthcare sector to improve customer journey and customer satisfaction. Usually a healthcare business have multiple value propositions and the brand message they want to convey is also slightly different than traditional businesses. The website would be the very first impression for a large number of prospects. That is the reason the healthcare websites are becoming increasingly important. In this blog we will cover the best practices for web design for healthcare to improve their relationship with their patients.
Improve First Impression with Web Design
People tend to search online for each and everything, when it comes to healthcare, it is very common for people to search in the online for the healthcare facilities, symptoms and diagnostics, etc. That is why a healthcare website can be a great tool for healthcare sector to reach out to extended markets and unexplored territories. There are chances that 10 to 50 percent of the healthcare website visitors would be new to your website, and would be having the very first interaction with your healthcare facility via the digital experience. The first impression of the brand for them would be the website. The studies have shown us that it takes less than a second for human brain to build a brand’s first impression and judge it on the bases on the looks and feel of its web design.
Most of the time the first screen without scrolling is responsible for the first impression. The first screen usually is dominated by a multimedia content, mainly a large image or image slider or a video. This area is called hero area and the image is called the hero image. This image and the content in this area have huge impact on the users, moreover the menu, logo, contact details, and other navigational components and the major design elements combined form the first impression of the website. The web design is a key player in building first brand impression. Minor changes in web designs, such as color scheme could have huge impact on the users.
Effectively Communicate Value Proposition
The value proposition and unique selling proposition are very important factors in customer journey. For any business it is crucial to communicate their brand message and highlight the key points which make them unique and better from the rest. For that the unique selling proposition or USP and value proposition are used. The USP or unique selling proposition is a message that tells how a business is better than its competitors. However, the value proposition is the value a business offers, it means what solution it can offer to the customers, and how it can improve their lives. For healthcare sector effectively communicating value proposition and unique selling proposition is equally important. The web design is extremely important in effectively communicating your brand message, value proposition and unique selling proposition.
Adding visual and graphical elements, help highlighting the important texts, headings, and sub-headings. Using images and videos can help getting more user attentions. The bullet points, lists, and charts help users absorb more information. Furthermore the web design uses different techniques to highlight important textual and non-textual content such as the font size, font style, color scheme, backgrounds, white spaces and many more. These all elements are used by the web design to effectively communicate the brand message and highlight important text and content such as value proposition and unique selling proposition.
Lead Oriented Customer Journey
The marketing trends have been changed since the past decade. During the last decade in UAE the internet and smartphone users have increased rapidly. This trend has been witnessed all around the world. People now a days tend to spend hours on their mobile phones and smart devices. People prefer to look up in the Google before making any decision. This means that the online competition is tough, however with the help of a good web design this can be done easily. Online sales, leads and conversions are totally dependent on the customer journey, if the customer journey is good you will be able to get more leads. The customer journey in the online comprises of all touch-points and interactions which can help in decision making or purchase process.
In order to prepare a web design with ability to capture more leads, the business must have to think from the customer’s point of view. The customer persona is a key to build a successful customer journey. Studies have shown that the customer place experience equal to the quality of the product or service. Which means having a right customer experience is crucial for a long term success. In today’s modern marketing landscape the most of the customer journeys are not linear, in fact the customer journey could be very twisted and torturous the business needs to understand the customer’s behavior and then the web design should be implemented in order to ensure the right interaction at touch point which will improve customer experience and help businesses’ obtain customer loyalty.
Responsive Web Design
These days the smartphone searches have already surpassed the desktop or traditional searches, which means that there is a huge potential for healthcare in smartphone channels. Especially most of the time in urgency people tend to look up for anything in the internet. For healthcare sector not tapping into this huge market could be catastrophic. That is why we always suggest our customer to go for a responsive or mobile friendly website. In fact almost around 95% of the customers demand responsive website these days. A responsive or mobile friendly web design has special source codes and programs in it, which can detect the screen size and the platform and then automatically the web design can render itself according to the platform and screen size. This ability is called responsiveness and sometimes it is also referred to as mobile friendliness.
For the healthcare sector the responsive websites are even more important. As most of the time when people are on the go or in hurry they prefer to use their smartphones and mobile devices instead of traditional computers. Despite that fact, now a days most of the searches on the internet are made from mobile devices, in fact the mobile searches have already surpassed the traditional searches since a few years now. That is why the mobile is not only a mean to improve patient’s experience but it can add great value to sales funnel too by attracting the potential customer who are using their smartphones and mobile devices to lookup for the hospital, clinic or healthcare facility. Moreover offering a consistent user experience at mobile and desktop website will add value to brand image and reputation. So it is best to have a responsive web design for healthcare facilities.
Intuitive User Interface (UI) and Enhanced Customer Experience (UX)
The user interface or UI is a key to a great customer/user experience. If a customer have a great user experience on a website, they are tend to make the decision quickly and they are also more likely to return to the website for repeated business. The UI or user interface is basically all the functionality and interactive part of the website. For example, all the button, menu, links, images and other features such as sharing content, accessing the contact information, dialing the business number directly from the website via a call icon, etc. Such features and all other features that a user can access on a website are part of the user interface, the user interface determines how a user will be able to access information and utilize those features on a website. And how easy or difficult that process is will decide the user experience. A happy user experience lead to genuine leads, and more business.
A great web design increase readability and usability of the web page by manipulating the colors, font sizes, styles, different visual effects and graphical presentations, and various other design techniques. These all tactics are used to enhance customer/user experience. The healthcare sector need to invest more in customer journey, customer experience and especially with their digital interaction with their patients. Most of the time when someone is searching for a hospital or clinic they are not peaceful and calm, that is why the simple and easy access to the required information and user-friendly navigational structure can significantly improve customer/user journey and experience. The healthcare sector can integrate different modules, such as patient portal, online appointment and booking module, online reports and record access module, etc. Such features can be made super-user-friendly with the help of a good web design.
SEO Friendly Web Design
For any modern day web design it is absolutely necessary to consider the search engines friendliness or compatibility. The SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique to improve web pages in terms of content, design, and source code and user experience to make them more user friendly and to get higher ranks in the search engines. The most popular search engine in the UAE or in fact in the entire world is Google. Hence almost all other search engines also follow the same standards and policies of the Google search engine. That is why it is important to make your web design compatible with the search engines to gain maximum website traffic from the search engine. This traffic is organic so it is also absolutely free. Most of the time the SEO plays a crucial role in online or digital marketing strategy. In some cases the search engine alone can drive more than 70% of the website traffic. Which is huge, that is why it is important for a business to focus on the SEO and search engine friendliness.
The search engines work on a simple principle, they have automated software which are also knows as search engine crawlers or spiders, these software programs automatically scan each and every web page on the internet and then they read its content, understand user journey and user experience, consider several factors and on the bases of all that they rank a page against a particular topic. When a user search in the Google or any other search engine, the search engine return those pages from its data repository where it have already ranked them according to their quality of content, user experience and relevance to the topic or keyword. The problem arises when a web design used outdated technology, or source code which is not readable for the search engine’s automated software and data crawlers. So, it is important that the web design consider all these limitations and follow maximum standards suggested by the Google and other search engines.
Conclusion
In today’s modern world which is predominantly dominated by the digital and information technology. Having an online presence is a natural thing for any business. Especially the businesses which are related to service based industries and which mainly operates on a B2C business model. The Online presence and digital efforts are absolutely necessary. For all digital efforts, the center point is the corporate website of the business. Websites are like the front desk or a reception for a business. For healthcare sector the websites and digital interaction with the patients is very important. In this blog we have listed some best practices for the web design of a healthcare facility/business. The purpose of this blog was to spread awareness about the importance of the web design and its impact on the overall business and its growth. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to lift-up your web face, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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