Healthcare web application development is a critical task. If you find your medical website designer sweating profusely while on the job, it’s not because your air conditioning isn’t working. It is because he is probably working too hard to achieve the desired outcomes.

Designing the perfect medical or healthcare website is never going to be easy. They pose a challenge and everyone in the medical website development sphere understands that. There are certain rules to be followed and some guidelines that are set by the industry and also best practices that are to be heeded. You just can’t ignore any of it while creating a professional healthcare website or application. Today we are going to tell you how you can focus on standard best practices to create a medical website and optimize it for maximum traffic and value for the user.

Your Website Needs To Communicate A Message

If you want your website to be successful in bringing in more traffic you need it to be more impactful and impressive than ever. It is not just a pretty brochure. It will communicate an important message and play a key role in building your brand. People are going to put their health in your hands and they will seek some ground on which they can base their trust on you. As a reputable brand make sure you send out a clear message and that it serves the purpose it was meant to.

Make Navigation Easy And Enjoyable

Your medical website designer would never build a website that is difficult to navigate. Your users or visitors should be able to find the information they are looking for rather quickly. Most medical providers create such web portals that efficiently integrate patient appointments with relevant information. You may need to do the same which is actually a no-brainer since your competition is doing it already. Don’t be intimidated with the sheer breadth of information a healthcare website needs to communicate. It is going to be abundant and if you haven’t evaluated it yet, you should soon.

Clever Use Of Stock Photography

Don’t leave any watermarks on them! Yes, these are silly mistakes but being silly is the reason they happen in the first place. A medical provider may tend to use the wrong web design company who doesn’t have much knowledge about what images to use or how to use them. A reputed healthcare mobile app development company will never end up using vague or common stock images. This is because it doesn’t communicate your message effectively and also takes away from the credibility of the website. Would you trust a medical site that sources their photos from Google images instead of putting their original pictures online to display the critical aspects of a medical symptom or a complicated treatment? I guess not! Finding the perfect stock photography is going to take hard work and more time than usual but it is going to pay off. Further they must also be carefully curated to match the message you are trying to convey through your website.

Optimization & Speed Matter A Lot

Custom healthcare software development is incomplete without optimization and speed. If your website is not optimized or scalable for searches and different screen sizes respectively, people are not going to find it useful. Same goes for your app as well. It has to load up fast and with equal smoothness across all platforms and devices. Remember, your user has the patience of a bubble, a little ripple and they are going to burst. They will not take a second to switch to another site or app. Therefore, page load speeds and optimization are going to be vital here and not only for the visitor’s experience but also to help you rank your website higher in the leading search engine results.

You Are Addressing Patients

This is one of the most common pitfalls for any medical website according to the leading healthcare app development companies. It is strange how their copy isn’t written for the user and even stranger that it is not even reader friendly. You are not giving them technical and medical terminology. Period! They are not going to be able to understand any of that. If your message isn’t patient-friendly, all the medical jargon or wording that you’ve used will make no sense to them. It is obvious that you can’t explain everything in layman language but incorporate the medical terms with simpler sentences so that the use of clinical language is clearly explained. They should feel that coming to your website is not a waste of time and that they can easily find the necessary information within a few seconds.

A Website – An Education Tool

All your medical website development tools and frameworks have failed if you haven’t been able to deliver an informative and educational website. Consumers and patients are not just looking for the treatments to their medical conditions. They are also online to educate themselves and find better and more practical ways to live and prevent certain conditions in the future. They will be looking to validate their choices and verify the facts they have gathered over time from other sources. They will use your site to better understand their options as well. You have to keep the education potential of your healthcare organization’s website high. You cannot compromise on the quality of content which is not just essential in helping you rank better but also establishing you as a leader and authoritative figure in the healthcare industry.

CTAs Are To Be Shown & Tracked

Call-to-action buttons are critical. You want to get your user base to do something and for that you will have to make some changes in your CTAs. You might or might not have this exact purpose in mind when designing a website but when you need to build trust in your customers about your offering and brand, you need to engage them and the best way is to keep your CTAs attractive and inviting.

Understand HIPAA And HITECH

You need to be well informed about current health laws and regulations. These will govern hosting and also assist in the protection of patient information. This is where HIPAA and HITECH, the two laws governing patient information come in. HIPAA, (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) intends to improve healthcare processes and also helps you reduce costs by standardizing common healthcare transactions. The HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) expands on what HIPAA does and provides minimum standards for handling protected health information (PHI). A healthcare app or software developer needs to keep all this in mind. These were just a few best practices with which we have only begun to scratch the surface. We haven’t even touched upon subjects like hosting solutions and detailed information security. Periodic auditing and back-ups and of course recovery requirements are a few more practices that will make for a very long discussion. We have thus left you with some very basic points to ponder over until next time.