Web Design for Dermatologists

Web design is such an important aspect of marketing for dermatologists because your website is the first experience your future patients are likely to have of your brand.

Your office or clinic’s website must be designed to…

• Indicate professionalism
• Be intuitive to perform functions (schedule dermatology appointments, learn about different skin conditions)
• Load all of its pages ultra-fast

…and more. When you work in any medical field such as dermatology, your layout needs to be clean and logical, or else potential patients just won’t trust you. Developing trust from the second your homepage loads is a critical factor of modern day business.

1. Begin with a clear plan for creating your office/clinic’s website

Mapping out the journey someone takes from clicking on one of your web pages to becoming a patient is so important if you want to create an effective web design. If you have a disorganized website, people will bounce, or leave it to find something that interests them more. In today’s digital-speed market, you don’t have much time to grab a potential patient’s attention.

2. Your Homepage: The First Impression Future Patients Will Have Of Your Dermatology Office/Clinic

Your home page is one of the most important things you want to get right when designing your website. It is the first impression new patients will have of your dermatology clinic. It must include:

• Clear value propositions oriented around healthier skin
• An overview of your dermatology services
• Trust building elements such as reviews and testimonials from patients who love how healthy their skin became as a result of your services

3. A Clear And Logical Taxonomy: One Of the Key Components Of Web Design And SEO

A website’s taxonomy refers to how information and pages are organized in your website as a whole. As an expert in dermatology, you’ll know where someone’s search for information begins. Perhaps the narrowest categories will be by common needs of patients:

• General skincare
• Acne treatment
• Psoriasis treatment

…and so on. This is precisely where your experience with the common needs of patients becomes so critical. You want to think of website taxonomies as a pyramid with a few broad categories that contain more specific needs so that a potential can intuit the logical place to find exactly the information they need.

Logical taxonomies are crucial to a positive patient experience, which means they are also an important variable of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is the work of making sure your website ranks high in the search results of Google and registers accurately as the information it is supposed to be. Studies indicate that an overall taxonomy of a website is becoming an important component o SEO.

4. Use Calls-To-Action Oriented Around The Pain Points Of Dermatology Patients

Calls-To-Action, or CTAs, are an important aspect of web design for dermatologists. CTAs are typically oriented around solving the pain points of the people who are browsing the website of the business in question. They call the consumer or patient to take certain actions such as scheduling an appointment, calling the clinic or office, or signing up to email newsletters, and more. As an expert in dermatology who has had contact with countless patients, you probably already know exactly what these pain points are. Here are a few examples of ways you can phrase your CTAs to make them more effective:

• Schedule an appointment for healthier skin
• Start fighting acne today
• Join our mailing list for the best information on skincare

…and so on.

5. Guide Dermatology Patients Through Your Website With Well-Designed Headers

The more organized your website is, the better, and headers serve as the big labels that help your patients find what they need to find. What’s more, they should use search-friendly keywords that boost your SEO as well. These headers need to be logical and organized just like every other aspect of your website. Use the following editorial “best practices,” of web layout.

H1 for title/page heading (Dermatology And Skin Care)
H2 for sectional headings (Dermatology For Teens; Dermatology For Seniors)
H3, h4 etc to further break up those subheadings (Care option 1, 2, and 3.)

6. Avoid Blocky Paragraphs That Could Bore Your Dermatology Patients

Even if it is not necessarily a medical emergency, your patients are likely to be in distress when they are going through your website. Skin problems horrify and often embarrass the people who are suffering from them. If a stressed out potential patient sees large blocky sections of near-illegible text, he or she is likely to become discouraged. That’s why you want to make sure you split up your text with subheads, bullets, numbers and more. This is also the only way to make sure your text is legible on smartphone devices, where the skinny screen space makes block text unpleasant to look at.

7. Address Your Dermatology Website’s 404s As Soon As Possible

Let’s say you change some element of your website and delete the old page. All materials such as ads and headers that directed people to the page will now bring to a 404 page. You have doubtless personally experienced the irritation and inconvenience that comes with landing on a 404 page. If you deliver this negative experience to people browsing your website, they are not likely to become your patients.

Fortunately, effective website design offers you a solution to this problem. Create 301 redirects that will take people to the next most relevant page of your website. This is important for your SEO efforts as well. Unaddressed 404s could damage your SEO, while 301 redirects can help retain whatever link juice or authority the previous page had.

8. Site Speed Is A Key Priority When Designing Your Dermatology Office Or Clinic’s Website

We’ve discussed how potential dermatology patients are often stressed out. Slow websites are likely to make them leave the page and look for information elsewhere. Selecting the most effective design elements is a way of making sure you’re not bogging down your load times with website features that patients don’t like, and don’t persuade them to use your services.