Have you ever ever skilled a twinge in your neck, itch in your throat, or one other random symptom, and turned to Google for solutions? If that’s the case, you’re in good firm — a whopping one billion searches per day are health-related!
With the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination campaigns capturing public consideration, correct, user-friendly healthcare web sites are extra essential than ever. Think about your healthcare group’s web site — is it a helpful useful resource that serves your group, or is there room for enchancment?
In the event you really feel your web site might serve guests extra successfully, you would possibly ponder revamping it and even constructing a brand new one. On this information, we’ll cowl the highest 4 greatest practices to boost your healthcare group’s web site:
- Map and optimize the consumer journey.
- Prioritize accessibility.
- Make your donation and/or volunteer alternatives straightforward to seek out.
- Use a steady enchancment strategy.
Optimizing your healthcare group or hospital’s web site design ensures sufferers and group members can discover the data they want shortly and with out problem. This will set up your group as a good, reliable establishment. Let’s dive in!
1. Map and optimize the consumer journey.
Healthcare web site guests need to discover data shortly and simply. They might be trying to find essential medical recommendation, medical doctors’ names and speak to data, a map of your facility, or different must-have data. Usually, these guests are in a rush or feeling harassed, so it’s your job to make sure that your web site is well accessible.
You may enhance your web site’s consumer expertise by mapping the consumer journey. The consumer journey is the best way guests work together along with your healthcare web site. It encompasses every step they take, from after they first arrive on the positioning to after they click on away.
Once you perceive what your web site guests are searching for, you’ll be able to optimize your web site to make their visiting expertise as stress-free as doable.
To create a consumer journey map, comply with these steps:
- Create personas for every section of your web site’s guests. Think about your viewers’s demographics and group viewers members primarily based on shared traits. As an illustration, you would possibly create profiles for various age teams, reminiscent of younger, middle-aged, and aged guests. Or, you would possibly group web site guests primarily based on their consumer intent, reminiscent of those that are visiting your web site to schedule an appointment, seek for a health care provider, or analysis medical data.
- Overview your web site analytics. Assess your web site’s metrics reminiscent of time spent on every web page and the bounce charge to find out your hottest pages. This allows you to know which pages guests are most excited about.
- Decide how one can meet guests’ wants at every step of the consumer journey. Mix data gathered whereas creating your consumer personas along with your web site analytics to determine how one can meet guests’ expectations at each step of the consumer journey. As an illustration, are you able to redesign your primary menu to spotlight your Most worthy pages? Do you have to use buttons and hyperlinks in your homepage to direct guests to your inner listing or analysis library? Take into consideration how one can make every customers’ expertise extra streamlined and handy.
Let’s check out how one hospital web site gives a transparent consumer pathway for its guests. Northside Hospital, a community of hospitals in Atlanta, presents a handy sequence of hyperlinks on its homepage that attraction to totally different customer intentions. Guests can choose whether or not they’re a brand new or returning affected person, physician, job seeker, present worker, or another person. The hyperlinks within the three columns on the precise change primarily based on the reply you select. For instance, right here’s what seems while you click on “New Affected person”:
That is an progressive solution to maintain your web site’s homepage streamlined and uncluttered whereas offering assets and instructions for every kind of customer. Think about your individual consumer pathways and design your web site to facilitate a quicker switch of knowledge.
2. Prioritize accessibility.
An accessible web site is usable by everybody, no matter their age or means. Accessibility is very inspired for all web sites, nevertheless it’s a requirement for hospital web sites specifically.
Hospital web sites should adjust to accessibility rules reminiscent of Part 508 of the People with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Internet Content material Accessibility Tips (WCAG). These rules be sure that anybody can shortly and simply entry the medical data they want.
To adjust to these necessities, your web site should comply with 4 pointers. Your web site have to be:
- Perceivable: All customers ought to be capable to understand the data in your web site. You may enhance notion by utilizing ample coloration distinction between the foreground and background, including different textual content to pictures and movies, and creating audio descriptions for textual content when crucial.
- Operable: Anybody ought to be capable to use your web site to seek out the data they want. You may make your web site extra user-friendly by providing a easy, streamlined navigation menu. This ensures that your web site helps keyboard navigation and makes use of clear and descriptive headers and labels.
- Comprehensible: Your web site’s content material have to be understandable to all viewers members. Ensure you keep away from jargon and idioms, use easy language, and maintain your navigational mechanisms the identical throughout all pages.
- Sturdy: Your web site’s content material needs to be sturdy sufficient that assistive applied sciences can precisely interpret the data. To make sure your web site stays sturdy, keep up-to-date on rising applied sciences and enhance your content material to align with improvements.
By making your web site accessible to all customers, you’re making well being data and entry extra equitable and reaching all segments of your group.
3. Make your donation and/or volunteer alternatives straightforward to seek out.
Within the wake of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges it’s offered to the healthcare subject, many individuals have been impressed to give their time and money to healthcare organizations.
In case your group accepts donations on-line, make these giving alternatives as straightforward to seek out as doable. You may enhance your website’s donor journey by:
- Providing a streamlined, mobile-friendly, on-line donation web page. Guarantee your donation kind solely asks for crucial data to assist donors transfer by way of the web page shortly, it doesn’t matter what system they’re utilizing.
- Utilizing call-to-action (CTA) buttons to level guests to your donation kind. These CTAs ought to inform guests to “Donate Now” or “Give Right this moment.”
- Selling your web site’s donation alternatives utilizing your social media and electronic mail platforms. Use your communication platforms to drive site visitors to your web site and promote your fundraising campaigns.
With a easy on-line donation course of, you’ll be able to present a handy manner for group members to point out their assist in a tough time.
As well as, in case you are accepting volunteers, you’ll want to additionally make these alternatives straightforward to seek out. Your volunteer sign-up varieties needs to be brief, accessible, and mobile-friendly to assist attain a wider viewers.
4. Use a steady enchancment strategy.
A steady web site enchancment strategy includes making incremental, ongoing enhancements to your web site. This strategy to internet design and improvement has a number of benefits, permitting you to:
- Keep away from main overhauls, which might eat massive quantities of your workforce’s time, power, and finances.
- Preserve a constant web site appear and feel for guests, which secures their belief.
- Make web site design selections primarily based on onerous knowledge, streamlining the decision-making course of.
The steps of a steady enchancment strategy embrace:
- Strategize: On this part, you’ll create your consumer journey maps, assess your web site analytics, and decide your plan for bettering the consumer expertise.
- Implement: Your group places its plans into motion by making small adjustments to web site pages over an prolonged interval.
- Iterate: You’ll assess the effectiveness of the adjustments utilizing your web site analytics instrument. Then, you’ll regulate your technique primarily based in your findings.
A steady enchancment strategy permits healthcare organizations to make common updates to assist their web sites keep worth long-term with out alienating guests with sudden adjustments.
With these enchancment suggestions, you must be capable to optimize your healthcare group’s web site to function a group useful resource, affected person engagement platform, and fundraising instrument.
In the event you need assistance at any step of the method, attain out to an online design and improvement agency for help. These professionals will make sure you’re utilizing the perfect practices with regards to accessibility, consumer expertise, search engine marketing, and steady enchancment.
