Homepage Design
As we help you find the web design formula for your treatment sites, one of the first steps is your homepage. Your homepage should clearly define your service.
Who are you? What do you do? What are your services? How are you going to help me?
All of this information should be easily found as soon as you get on the website. If it takes someone more than 2 or 3 seconds to get an understanding of how your treatment center can help, you have lost them. They will leave your site and search elsewhere.
Great, so what are some specifics?
Clear and descriptive above the fold CTAs – As soon as someone gets to your website, they should have a clear understanding of what you offer and a few different options on how to navigate specific services or information.
Clear value prop – What value do you bring? How will you bring it? What exactly is someone going to get out of working with your treatment center?
Remove automatic carousels – It’s tempting to use a carousel because it is an easy way to display different information and add some “cool” functionality to your site. Don’t do it. They dilute your message and they are annoying.
Display trust and authority – Do you have any awards or accolades? Are there personal reviews or testimonials you can display? Are there badges or certifications you can show off on your homepage? Don’t be shy. People are looking for a solution to their problem, your job is to show them that you can help.
Menu and Navigation
In order to create functionality through the web design of your treatment sites, think of your navigation as a roadway. Imagine your website is a city and the navigation links are the roads and interstates that connects all the different neighborhoods or towns.
A good city layout will have a huge impact on how quickly and easily people can commute from one side to the other. Your navigation is the same way. If you don’t make your site easy to navigate, then you will lose most (if not all) conversions because people won’t be able to find the answers to their problems.
Include a click to call on every page – That’s what we want right? We want people to call. We want people to feel safe enough to reach out to us for help. So why get in the way of that? Include a click to call button on the top of every page!
Show consolidated mobile menu – You never want to display all of your navigation links on menu. Ideally, you want to consolidate them into a “hamburger” menu.
If you use drop downs in your navigation, organize them alphabetically – This will drastically increase your time on site as well as your pages per visit, because people will intuitively know where to find what they are looking for. Below is a great example.
Include educational links in the menu – It’s valuable to show guides or case studies in the menu, because the educational content will support the sales pages. The more you can display your expertise, the better your site will display trust.
How to Format Content and Information
It’s important to understand from the beginning that people generally don’t read information on websites, they scan it.
The art of consolidating and highlighting headers, bullet points and summaries into an easily navigated web page is a huge difference maker in how well your content is received.
In our 6 years as a company, we have experimented with many different layouts and structures to properly formulate a website. Our experience has shown us the best way to do it!
Always have a clear and informative title – The headline is the hook. If you can’t get people to say “what’s this about?” then you sure can’t get them to read on. There are many different formulas for cultivating great headlines. I think this article does it best.
Break content up with headers – This is probably the biggest mistake amateur content writers (especially health professionals) make. Most of us are used to writing long form papers as we used to in school, college or even doctorate programs. On the internet, you need to take your ideas and break them into bite sized chunks. You then format those ideas or chunks to manageable heads and subheads. For an example, just look at how this article was written.
Use bullet points – Why? Because people will always stop and look at the bullet points.
- They break things up
- They quickly and easily display information
- The display content in list formats
- The break in styling and white space naturally attract the eye
Calls to Action and Selling Points
The entire function of your web design is to convert your web traffic into phone calls through your treatment sites. The kpi for a treatment center is almost always going to be a phone call or a form fill (more on that later).
So we need to understand why some web sites convert into phone calls and why some don’t. The answer is almost always copy writing and call to action. Some key takeaways.
Use descriptive ctas – The person should know what to expect when they call. Are they calling a help specialist? Are they joining a wait list? Are they calling a receptionist? The worst thing you can do is simply have a phone number with no clear expectation. Tell the people what they are getting.
Prioritize your cta through contrast of color – It’s so simple and so frequently done improperly. What color is your background? What color is your call now button? Make them different. Here’s a good example.
Optimizing Your Form Fills
Make no mistake, your main objective is to get a phone call, but not everyone is ready to take the big step of making a phone call. Form fills are just as valuable and are an important option because they give people a way to ask for help who may be feeling more scared or insecure about the journey ahead.
So how do we optimize our design for form fills?
Use chat – We’ve experimented with chat for years. I’ve gone back and forth on this issue but over time I’ve come to a strong conclusion about it. Use chat. So many of us are accustomed to communicating through written text. The conversion metrics will be much less then a phone call, but if will be worth it.
Make it easy for people to schedule appointments – A big hurdle for people to commit to admitting into treatment or booking an appointment is schedule. Using an appointment app will ease that and put the power into the users hands. I like using calendly.
Use as few fields as possible – It’s tempting to want to collect all the information at once. A form fill is not a landing page, the point of a form fill is to create an introduction. Name, phone number and email address is all you need.
Now What?
You don’t want to spend your time on websites and marketing, you want to be working with your patients and helping people get better.
No worries! That’s what we are here for.
Investing in your digital marketing is to invest in the future. I’ve seen countless examples of treatment centers getting comfortable in the marketing infrastructure they have built, only to be in a panic when things change.
Everything will change. What’s working for you now may not work for you next year.
When that day comes, will you be prepared? Will you be branded and will you have a marketing strategy that can sustain itself?
I hope this article about proper web design practices for treatment sites can help guide you towards your goals.
To inquire about our high end services, please call us or fill out a form below!
P.S. – A huge reference for this blog was Google’s UX Playbook for Healthcare. I recommend you read the entire document as well.
