Proper Design Practices

Medical website development can be quite difficult. While there are many tools on the market that claim to help you design a custom website with ease, good medical website design encompasses much more than the ability to cut and paste content into a web-editing tool.

Medical Website Design – Best Practices
When designing a physician’s website, there are some general principals that can ensure that the website has a professional look and is easy to use. A medical website designer who follows these basic principals has a solid foundation for building a website that can help turn casual visitors into patients.

Navigation
One of the most frustrating things for a visitor to a doctor’s website is not being able to figure out where to go for information. This falls under the category of navigation. The visitors to your medical website need to be able to easily see where the navigation buttons can take them and they need to be able to tell quickly which page they’re currently on.

Some tools to aid with navigation are:

• Rollover hints on navigation buttons
• A site map
• Breadcrumbs

Typography
Sometimes, professional website designers like to use specialized fonts when designing a website. Unfortunately, if the visitor does not have this font installed on their computer, it will not render correctly and the effect of using it is diminished.

To make sure that specialty fonts are able to be seen by all visitors to the doctor’s website, the designer may create an image using the font so when the page loads, the image is displayed to all visitors.

Unfortunately, not all fonts look good to all visitors. Some of the more intricate fonts are hard for people with vision problems to read. Others may look too flashy or gaudy and take away from the credibility you’re trying to establish with future patients.

Consistency
One thing that many websites (even those created by website design services) lack is consistency. Web pages need to match across the entire website. Headings, font colors, font types, buttons, design elements, styles, etc. all need to remain the same from one page to the next. Even if the design is bad, consistency can help give the impression of quality.