In this article, we reveal our top medical website design tips and explore what that means for your healthcare organization, hospital, or healthcare practice.
Keep reading to see how proper healthcare website design can help drive results and deliver patients.
Top tips on how to improve medical website design
Below, we’ve broken down some of the essential medical website design tips that can positively or adversely affect patient conversions.
K-I-S-S (keep it simple and sweet)
Think of simple as brief and clear. Think of sweet as empathetic and visitor-focused. This medical website design tip relates to how healthcare site design is often heavily influenced by a medical point-of-view instead of what patients want and need.
Though it’s a natural inclination to portray your organization as deeply informed, intelligent, and experienced, this can leave a prospective patient feeling confused or experiencing fear and anxiety over not understanding.
Intensely academic white papers may score high marks in medical school, but lengthy online content created using industry jargon often causes confusion or stress. Your prospective patients lead busy lives. If the content is difficult to understand or too lengthy, people will simply move on.
Visitors seek digestible bits of information written in their language. Information that speaks directly to alleviating their in-the-moment needs. Consider writing and designing your website for that family member that wants to understand in a simple sentence or two just what it is you do for a living.
Think simple, straightforward, and visitor-focused.
Use consistent branding
The consistent use of branding elements—be it logos, fonts, colors, reading level, voice/writing style, visual language styling, icon styles, infographics, or illustrations—all of these add up in the visitor’s mind. Viewers will inherently and instinctively notice if a site feels as if it was thoughtfully crafted end-to-end. They’ll feel it, which is why using consistent branding is one of the most important medical website design tips.
Proper and consistent branding also lends well to ease of use and readability as well as the logical hierarchy of elements as cited above.
And if a visitor converts to a patient and finds your site supports the same general look and feel of your facility and staff, your website and branding overall are strengthened all the more.
Color schemes
Have you ever walked into a home or office building and felt an immediate stark and distant feeling? Too often, medical practices and hospitals select a cold or sterile color scheme for their facilities and even their healthcare marketing materials and medical website.
However, the proliferation of online shopping and social tools has progressed people’s understanding of well-thought-out color integrations in the world around them.
Your website visitors have become conditioned to expect an inviting and harmonious color scheme in other areas of their life. So it goes with your website as well.
In addition to your color scheme being warm, tasteful, and inviting, your colors need to work hard for you. It’s important to associate distinct and differentiated colors with desired actions you’d like your visitor to act on. A proper hierarchy of color systems will help them navigate your site intuitively.
Creating a pleasant and logical visual experience through the consistent use of color can mean the difference between a prospective patient exiting your site quickly versus lingering a bit longer and taking you up on a call-to-action.
But there is another aspect to color schemes critical for today’s medical website design. Accessibility. The standards set forth by the ADA and other governing bodies can get you in legal hot water if not heeded in highly-regulated markets like healthcare.
There are many components to accessibility design, but color depth, contrast, and hues are perhaps chief among them—the entire spectrum of color has been defined, ranked, published, and can be digitally assessed for compliance.
Use quality imagery
Site visitors respond well to the imagery that portrays relatable people and positive outcomes. Hospital garments, surgical instruments, and medical equipment may demonstrate investment and resources, but those images can be cold, off-putting, and alienating for people with health concerns.
Instead, look to demonstrate the end objective—returning to, or maintaining, good health. And do so by featuring people that closely align with your typical patient demographic.
But, when it comes to medical website design tips, you also should keep in mind that a healthcare website’s images should not be dimly lit or utilize inconsistent styling or coloration, nor are they poorly cropped, framed, or composed.
Lastly, remember that visitors will view your website on many different devices. Therefore, all imagery must have enough resolution to hold (or not pixelate) across multiple interface sizes—from large desktop and wall monitors to smartphones requiring exceptionally high resolutions.
Share valued content
Akin to the KISS principle above, content that serves the visitor should be readily available to help answer known and anticipated questions, concerns, and needs clearly.
For example, when new patients visit your website, they may be preparing for a procedure and ready to dig into longer-form informational content that helps manage their expectations about that event.
Whereas a prospective patient may simply browse and graze to get a feel for the practice. Does the facility emphasize caring staff? Does the facility—and its website—look professional, clean, and organized? Do they have expertise that fits my need? Have other patients spoken about the experience I can expect with this group or facility?
A prospective patient that returns several times may be looking for high-level medical answers that speak to what they are experiencing and help convince them to reach out.
Or, in the case of a long-term patient, a visit to your medical website will likely be utility-oriented—checking in, updating their information, checking schedules, and other quick tasks.
Remember that valued content is only valuable relative to that visitor’s unique needs and progress point along their medical journey pathway. Your site should take all types of visitors into account.
Make it easy to use
Ease of use comes in many forms—logical and well-organized navigation, plain language, establishing a hierarchy, and consistent use of elements such as fonts, button types, colors, and sizes, creating intuitive and straightforward forms, designing for mobile readiness, and even ensuring your site loads quickly through proper coding.
In short, it’s important to address anything that impedes a visitor from what they hope to learn or accomplish as they explore your site. After all, your website may be the only reference point visitors have to assess your group or facility.
If your site is easy to navigate and pleasant to use, that directly reflects your brand.
Design is important, very
A primary tool in delivering an experience that’s “easy to use” is design. Design can mean many things, but in terms of medical website design tips, it means that structure and aesthetics must come together to create an engaging experience.
In terms of structure, well-spaced elements allow the visitor to digest information one concept at a time—not unlike properly-ordered chapters in a book. Trying to say everything all at once or in the wrong order can be like saying nothing at all.
But aesthetics are also important when it comes to medical website design tips. Select a harmonious color system, use thought-out font systems that are understood hierarchically by the visitor and align with search engine rules, and create consistent illustration styles that depict concepts elegantly. All of these things work together to create a sense of cohesion, reassurance, and professionalism regarding your medical brand.
Design must target your specific audience
As we’ve established, it’s important to speak the language of your audience. That premise extends to visual language as well. If someone is experiencing pain, they may not be interested in fun and funny motifs and design.
But portraying someone similar to the visitor as getting their life back to normal can help disarm their anxiety. And conveying that comforting sentiment through, say, a simple infographic can quickly assure the visitor how and why that relief is actually possible for them.
Relating to your visitor’s needs can bring some semblance of comfort to them right then and there on the site. And articulating real hope through design can be a powerful communication tool in creating connections with site visitors.
Mobile-friendly medical website design is essential
Laptops are mobile, tablets are mobile, phablets are mobile, and smartphones are mobile. And for each manufacturer, there are ten unique sizes and proportions to consider.
Multiply all that by the need for portrait (vertical) as well as landscape (horizontal) viewing, and the size iterations and requirements become exponential. In addition, the same content that will appear on a 55” monitor must also fit on a smartphone.
Anticipating these very real dynamics is one of the most crucial medical website design tips to keep in mind. All of that and more place a premium on the length, size, and styling of content across different devices.
Coupled with how differences in how content is handled device to device—from touch technology to collapsing menus and so much more—can make or break a healthcare website’s likelihood of converting browsing visitors to patients.
FAQs related to our medical website design tips
There are many ways to market your healthcare services, but some tactics—like websites—are proven to help you convert more patients. Read on to get answers to common questions you might have after reading this blog post about medical website design tips.
What makes a good medical website?
A good medical website helps users get the healthcare services information that they need quickly. They feature clear, precise web copy, uncluttered design elements, and modern coding that makes the site responsive, making it fast and simple to get what they, regardless of their device or ability.
What is the best CMS for medical website design projects?
A CMS, or content management system, is a foundaitonal tool for setting up and maintaining your medical website. There are many different website building solutions on the market, and which is the best choice for one healthcare organization may not be the right option for another. That’s why here at TBH Creative, we work closely with each partner to discuss their needs before recommending one CMS over another.
While you might have heard of Drupal and WordPress (two extremely popular open-source CMS options), your healthcare organization may benefit from choosing a CMS designed with medical marketers’ needs in mind instead. TBH Creative’s CMS, for example, has customized options built in for easy creation and maintanence of location pages, physician directories, provider detail pages, and more!
What makes a good patient portal?
When it comes to patient portals, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some key considerations to review when looking into your options include:
- Ease of use: The patient portal should be intuitive and easy to use. It should have a user-friendly interface that is consistent with the rest of your healthcare organization’s website.
- Flexibility: The patient portal should be flexible and customizable to meet the needs of your healthcare organization. It should be able to integrate with your existing EHR and other medical software applications.
- Security: The patient portal should have robust security features to protect patient information. It should comply with all relevant federal and state laws, including HIPAA.
- Support: The patient portal should come with excellent customer support. The vendor should be able to provide training and troubleshooting assistance as needed.
Need more medical website design tips
If you’re ready to delve deeper into issues related to your healthcare organization’s website upgrade or medical site’s redesign, the experts at TBH Creative can help. We’ve worked with big hospitals and multi-location healthcare providers to build award-winning, intuitive websites that patients love (and deliver results). Check out our web design portfolio for inspiration and ideas.
