A compelling website is not just a reservoir of information about your physical therapy clinic. It has the power to guide browsers away from your competition and into your practice.
Once consumers have found your website, much of the hard work of attracting new clients and catering to your current ones has already been done. You simply need to cultivate those relationships using top web design techniques. Implement these top-10 tips to build a website that yields the highest ROI.
1. Incorporate HIPAA Compliance
The rapport you build with your patients is founded upon trust. Since patients share information with medical professionals that is often more sensitive than they would give to most other businesses, HIPAA compliance is necessary for any medical website design element that transmits such data. To comply with HIPAA law and prevent disclosure to unauthorized individuals, adhere to four rules:
- Privacy
- Security
- Breach Notification
- Enforcement
Your website’s data collection and storage features must retrieve and retain the following types of information securely:
- Demographics
- including name, birthdate, ethnicity, and gender
- Identification numbers
- including social security number, medical records numbers, and health beneficiary numbers
- Full face photos and biometric identifiers
- like iris or retina scans, fingerprints, or voiceprints
- Health information
- such as prescriptions, test results, diagnoses, and treatments
2. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
Take cues from the best websites you’ve encountered across your industry. Great physician website design, for example, blends a warm, conversational tone with clear, thorough explanations of treatment options.
You may choose to use a concise menu bar at the top of your homepage with tabs for each of your service areas or key treatments. Each of these could have their own subpages that are easily accessed with a click.
Clickable grids that showcase the services defining your brand will be eye-catching and provide breaks from blocks of text. Use these sparingly, though, to avoid cluttering your pages with distracting graphics or slowing your website speed.
Prominent grids or buttons are also great for calls-to-action. They can feature requests for consumers to
- “Call Now”
- “Download a free ebook”
- “View FAQ”
3. Prioritize Accessibility
According to data published by Small Business Trends, federal lawsuits regarding website accessibility increased 177% between 2017 and 2018. If your content is difficult to read, or if accessing it does not involve a reasonably intuitive process, you could eventually find yourself in legal trouble.
Allowing more people to easily use your site will increase your traffic and improve search engine rankings. Include the following features in your physical therapy website design to improve content accessibility:
- For those who have difficulty using a mouse, ensure that all content can be accessed with just a keyboard.
- Instead of giving links a “Click Here” label, use descriptive links that can be read by a screen reader for the visually impaired.
- Use alternative (alt) text to describe images.
- Include captioning for videos in consideration of the hearing impaired.
- When choosing fonts and background colors, ensure that these elements adequately contrast one another to prevent eye strain.
4. Make it Mobile Friendly
Nearly 90% of internet users access the web via mobile devices. That means you need to design your website for compatibility with different screen sizes and device types. The last thing you want is for a visitor to leave your website because your content didn’t fit their screen, was cut off, or required excessive scrolling.
Not only does this leave the visitor with the impression that your website and business are unprofessional, it also negatively affects your search ranking. When Google deciphers that your site is lacking in mobile readability, you will show up less and less in search results for mobile devices.
Prevent these problems by adopting a mobile mindset from the start of your website design.
- If you use WordPress, choose from one of their responsive themes. These automatically configure your pages for display on whatever device a visitor uses.
- Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) by Google, which compresses data and speeds up your page loading times.
- Avoid using Flash-enabled elements, as they significantly slow down loading.
- Prioritize simplicity and avoid unnecessary widgets, graphics, and other design elements.
- Ensure that buttons are large enough to use on mobile devices.
5. Appeal to Your Demographic
You know your clients, and which things they tend to find important or interesting. Doctors use this understanding to impart a caring tone with their content. Personal trainer websites incorporate commanding text and striking colors to convey strength. What noverbal message do you want to send to your website users about you?
Choose color schemes that are known to invoke a sense of trust, rejuvenation, and well-being. Add professional photos of your staff members. Join these elements with your logo, tagline, and cues that distinguish your brand in order to attract the clients you want.
6. Maximize Relevant Content
Though content itself is not a design element, it is an important aspect to consider from the start of your website creation. You must decide if you want to include a blog, vlog, or articles that will call for continuous updates to your site.
Consider how content will be laid out for maximum visual effect and clarity. Once you have created a framework for your content, consistently post information that answers important questions, is compelling, and makes visitors want to return.
7. Make it Interactive
One of the best ways to keep your website users engaged is to provide interactive tools that take your calls-to-action to a new level. You can help clients save time by allowing them to access the following with one click:
- Appointment setting
- Provide a form that allows users to view availability, and make or change appointments.
- Live chat
- Many users will prefer to make contact with someone from your clinic in real time, and they will appreciate your efforts to make that happen. Even if you don’t have 24-hour availability, show the times that your clinic has staff on hand to provide general information via chat.
- Test results
- Include a portal that allows patients to securely access their exam results as soon as they are ready.
- Social media buttons
- Place clickable social media icons near the menu bar or in a place where users are likely to see them just before leaving your site. Embed your Twitter or Instagram feed on your site to provide a reminder for users to stay connected to you. You can give them continued post updates without having to cross a contact barrier every time.
8. Use High Quality Legal Graphics
In addition to professional photos of your staff and facility, there may be areas of your website that require pictures not derived from your personal stock. You can find free photos in many places online and use them to drive home your story.
Pexels, Unsplash, and pixabay are three websites that provide royalty-free images and video. However, depending on the content you choose, there will be rules regarding their use and how you should cite the source
9. Optimize Website Speed
If you’ve taken measures to make your physical therapy website user-friendly, you are already improving speed. Those techniques compress data and eliminate clutter that would otherwise increase load times.
Take these additional measures to deliver fast and reliable information online:
- Give careful thought to choosing a host for your website. Rather than a shared web hosting provider, you may opt for one that provides you with a dedicated server.
- Have your web designer minify your code. This involves the removal of unnecessary commas, code strings, and characters that create clutter.
- Double check the sizes of your images and reduce them as much as possible without sacrificing quality.
10. Avoid Unrealistic Claims and Promises
Taglines or content that promises cures or results that you cannot verify are not only misleading, they could be illegal. The best way for you to convince consumers of your expertise is to deliver relevant information, assistance, and effective treatment, time and again.
Using these techniques, you will cultivate a track record of consistent, top-notch service provided through your website. Contact Clever Solution for help with your physical therapy web development, and your physical therapy clinic can become known as one of the best.