Do you need a medical website design that makes clients feel like getting your services? – It takes a person less than 1 second to decide if a website looks trustworthy enough to stay there.
In the medical industry, this second can be the difference between selling services or not selling much.
When designing an eCommerce website, a website designer will have to follow specific guidelines and use specific elements to give the website the feel of a physical store. Features such as the details of an item and how to purchase it will have to be displayed, but these elements cannot be used during medical website design. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to provide you with 5 steps to help you create the best medical website.
There is a huge difference between how an eCommerce website and a medical website are designed. The difference comes with the purpose of the website and the need to meet the expectations of your visitors.
However, the differences do not rule out the fact that these niches fall under one umbrella and share similar guidelines. Elements such as the navigation menu, typography, communication, load time, imagery and many others will have to be included in almost every web design. But depending on the nature of the website, these elements will be applied differently.
Medical Website Design
I have pointed out already the uniqueness of medical website design and how different it is from eCommerce websites. For example, while an eCommerce website will focus on giving visitors the opportunity to shop online, a medical website will seek to provide medical solutions to its visitors.
We also need to note that the medical scale is a broad one and the purpose for one medical website might be different from the purpose of another medical website.
There are some medical platforms which are designed purposely for interacting with the clients of a hospital. Such websites are hospital websites and are different from a medical website which focuses on analyzing several medical conditions and providing solutions. Understanding these basic differences will help you build the best medical platform.
How to Build the Best Medical Website
1. Medical website design builders
A few years back, designing a website would have required following very complicated instructions. These instructions were not only confusing but were very much time-consuming. But those days are long behind us with the rise of content management systems.
These Content management systems ensure that website designers are able to design their own website and manage them without having to follow manual coding rules. Therefore, instead of coding, most website designers now focus on uplifting the aesthetic image of the website.
Content management systems usually come in two categories: offline software tools and online proprietary tools. With offline tools, a designer is able to arrange all pages, categories and other essential elements and later publish through a host and they can be used without any internet connection. On the other hand, the online proprietary tools help you design your website online.
For the purpose of this article, I will only suggest a few of the online content management systems which can help you in your medical website design. But it has to be noted that there are some vital details that we need to look out for when choosing the best content management system.
These elements include the ease of use, affordability, customer support, abundant template options and mobile compatibility.
Affordability
In terms of affordability, we are looking at the agency that will provide us with the best services but at a moderate and affordable price. Usually, most content management systems charge between $3 and $10 a month. It might not be an established fact but there is a huge probability of getting the best from companies whose rates are reasonably higher.
With regard to customer support, we need to be certain that our medical website design company will be readily available whenever we need them. This is essential because we should not get ourselves in situations where our websites will be down and the agency will be unavailable to help get it back.
The agency should also have an abundance of templates that will entice our visitors to stay and enjoy the content on our website. The available templates should also be compatible with mobile phones so that mobile phone users will be able to access our website without difficulties.
Based on the outlined criteria, I would suggest WordPress, Wix, Dr. Leonardo, uKit, and AboutMyClinic as some of the best Content management systems for your medical website design. But of course, WordPress and Wix will emerge as the ideal candidates due to the fact they have been the go-to place for most website designers for the past few years.
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2. Create better categories
One of the key elements that cannot be underestimated when building any website is categories. This is essential because categories help in the arrangement of different posts on a website. Since posts on a website might come with a specific or similar theme, we cannot mix them up as that puts visitors off.
It is for this reason that a general news website will have a separate category for politics, entertainment, foreign news, sports and others based on their theme. By doing so we make sure that a visitor will easily find all sports-related news on the website or all entertainment contents by clicking on the category.
Ideally, categories are placed at the top of every website for visitors to easily identify them. Some designers provide drop-down menus for certain categories to make things even simpler. For example, a sports category could have subcategories such as soccer, boxing, basketball, rugby, tennis, and athletics.
Just like news websites, medical websites do have peculiar categories. But like I indicated earlier, the selection of categories will depend on the purpose of the medical website. There are certain medical platforms that provide medical news and have thus categorized the contents based on prominent medical conditions.
Certain medical websites instead focus on a single medical condition and tease out categories for it. There could, therefore, be a medical website for HIV/AIDS and have categories such as about the disease, treatment and support, research on the disease and news on the disease.
In order to get the best categories in your medical website design process, it is crucial you identify the purpose of your website. You can also consider what your visitors will expect from your medical website to select the best categories.
3. The homepage
Homepages are also an essential element in medical website design. It is usually the first page that a visitor gets access to whenever he or she logs on to a website. The homepage also helps to project important posts, images, videos, categories, call to action and others.
Although similar, the homepage of a website is different from a landing page of a website. The latter is usually designed as a standalone web page for a specific item on a website and they are prominent in advertisements. On the other hand, the homepage encompasses all the elements of a website.
When designing websites, web design agencies have the opportunity to choose from two types of homepages. They are the static homepage and the dynamic homepage. Both types are different and fulfill varying purposes.
Static Homepage
Static homepages are homepages that are static as the name suggests. They do not change when new posts or pages are added on the websites. Static homepages display items for as long as they have not been altered by the designer.
In relation to dynamic homepages, they respond to the changes made to the website through posts and articles. It thus follows that an article which was published a day ago will not appear at the top of the website because it might have been replaced by a new post.
In order to have a better medical website design, we need to bear in mind the importance of the homepage as I have outlined above. Depending on the nature of the medical website, we would also have to go either with a static or dynamic homepage. If your website provides just services, it will be ideal to choose a static homepage and choose a dynamic homepage if the medical platform is information related: provides medical information and news for visitors.
Most importantly, there are certain elements that need to appear on the homepage of our website, regardless of the type we choose. There should be a professionally designed logo to represent our brand, an intuitive navigation menu and an About Us page. There should also be a call to action button where needed.
Other medical platforms go to the extent of adding social proofs of their services. These social proofs could be certification, awards or recommendations. We should also not forget to add quality photos and videos if possible to attract our visitors.
4. Color palette
Color is one of the most important concepts in the designing industry. It is a phenomenon that is held in high esteem by video editors, graphic designers, artists, painters and certainly website designers. It is a major communication tool that should be used efficiently.
One of the intriguing things about colors is the meaning attached to individual colors. The color red has its own meaning, green also has a meaning as well as black. This makes it very difficult to use just any color for a particular purpose or to communicate a message.
For most website designers, choosing the best colors is as important as choosing categories on a website. This is basically because we want our visitors to feel connected to the website through the use of colors. Colors such as blue, red, green, and white are considered as the best colors for your medical website design.
White is the Universal Color
White has been usually classified as a universal color and it is for good reasons too. It comes along with such a positive atmosphere that is related to relation to purity and healing. It thus emerges as one of the colors in medical website design.
Another color that is widely used by medical website designers in medical website design is blue. For most people, the color induces calmness, confidence, reliability, seriousness, and serenity. With the meanings associated with it, blue certainly is one of the top colors to be used in medical website design.
Blue can be used as a complementary shade in addition to the primary shade: white. Shades of blue such as light blue, ocean blue and dark blue can also be used in medical website design but not forgetting the special meanings attached to them.
Apart from blue, green is one of the colors that you would have to consider using when designing a medical website. The basic meaning of the color is prosperity and well-being and it is a color that resonates very well with people. By using green, we assure our visitors and clients that prosperity and a healthy lifestyle can be achieved through our website.
There are some top medical websites across the globe who also use red in addition to white as the colors for their medical platform. The color usually connotes something which is powerful and something which is of much importance and explains why it is a preferred color.
5. Mobile friendly website
We cannot deny the fact that most internet users prefer to use their mobile phones or tablets as compared to their laptops or computers. This is because of the portable nature of mobile phones. With this in mind, we need to find a way to ensure that our visitors are able to access our content from their mobile phones or tablets.
This is where the concept of mobile-friendly comes in. It is an important concept in web designing that ensures that information on your website is accessible on mobile devices. The information includes texts, images, videos, categories, and links.
By creating a mobile-friendly website, our goal is to ensure that visitors don’t have the struggle to read texts. Neither should they zoom before they are able to access information on the website.
With mobile compatibility, the focus is to have mobile phone users accessing a website without challenges. Ensuring mobile compatibility doesn’t mean changing the content that appears on the phone and that which appears on a laptop.
Optimizing your website for mobile use is also important in achieving a mobile-friendly website. After designing your medical website, you can check the mobile-friendly nature of your website through Google’s mobile-friendly tool. The test will provide you with details on whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
If it turns out that your website is not mobile-friendly, then you will need to optimize it. We can start by taking a look at our theme and making sure that it is mobile-friendly. We should also improve the load time of the website by implementing caching, compressing images, and using a CDN.
The Key to Building a Sleek Healthcare Platform
In order to become a top medical platforms across the globe, it’s essential that you follow a good design. These steps have been carefully selected and are geared towards giving you the best results.
We need to always ensure that we have chosen the best Content management system for our medical web design. We can do so by considering factors such as medical website design cost and customer support. Also an abundance of well optimized medical website design templates to choose from.
I have also indicated that to create the best medical website design, you need to identify the purpose of your website and break them down into little units. This will help you to come up with unique categories that will meet the needs of your visitors. While creating better categories, we should also create an enticing homepage.
Choosing the best colors and making your website mobile-friendly are also key steps in building the best medical website. These steps are what a good medical website design agency will follow to provide you with the best medical website.
