Redesigns for health system websites are complex and time-intensive. It isn’t easy to take apart, reorganize, and rebuild your entire digital home. A lot can potentially go wrong — to the tune of millions of dollars.
A poorly done redesign won’t only cost you web traffic. It’ll cost you patients.
Some website updates flop — hard — and others end in wild success (like a 141% increase in organic traffic or a 1,088% increase in new users.) What’s the difference between a major fail and a successful project?
In our experience, it helps to:
If you’re updating, merging, or migrating your site soon, start planning now. Our hospital website redesign guide helps you set the foundation for effective messaging and, most importantly, an effective website.
Before starting any company-wide initiative — especially one as large as a redesign — it’s crucial to get everyone on the same page. Inform every team and strategic leader about the changes happening and why those changes are taking place.
You might be starting a healthcare website design project for many reasons, like to:
No matter the reason, you’ll need executives and subject matter experts (SMEs) on board from the start. Their input and feedback will be helpful throughout the process, and their buy-in keeps your project on track and aligned with goals.
Some strategic decisions may be controversial to team members, such as sunsetting microsites or using language that SMEs don’t use (but patients do). Use data when presenting these kinds of decisions to leaders in your organization.
Your content agency can also help you communicate with stakeholders about the project. At Aha Media Group, we create resources you can use to educate SMEs and promote buy-in at every level.
A website audit lets you evaluate your site at the page level and see what’s working (or what isn’t). Auditing your website helps you know which pages to keep, merge, or sunset.
What steps should an audit include? Here’s what we recommend:
Insights from your audit become your customized hospital website redesign guide. Use these findings to plan effective website content.
Now that you have your audit, consider what you learned from it. What problems do you need to solve? How can you optimize your site and improve the user experience?
Use these findings to guide you as you create your sitemap — it organizes your webpages and maps out the structure of your health system website. Your sitemap tells you what pages will exist on your new site, where they will live and how your pages are connected. See an example of a sitemap for a health system’s website:
Related: The difference between a site map and information architecture can trip some people up. But not you (after reading this article).
We could make a lot of construction analogies here, but to put it succinctly, content crumbles without a strong foundation. When you rush into content writing, you risk having content that doesn’t resonate with readers or achieve your goals.
That’s why we recommend investing time into documenting 3 things before writing any web content:
Our hospital website redesign best practices list would be incomplete without content briefs, which are like outlines for your webpages. They tell writers what content will live on each page and which keywords to target.
Content briefs take time to create but pay off in the long run. Planning the content for each page (before it’s written) lowers the risk of duplicate content, reduces the need for significant edits and helps your healthcare website design project move forward on schedule.
Create your content briefs after documenting your sitemap and messaging strategy. For each webpage, make sure to include:
What’s a realistic timeline for a health system website update?
If your project includes rewriting and redesigning hundreds of pages after completing an audit, interviewing SMEs and doing the foundational work for your messaging … your redesign can take up to 2 years (or more).
Initiatives at this scale take time to do correctly. Fortunately, the more time your team invests in the beginning, the less time you’ll spend on edits (or worse, complete rewrites). As they say, “slow down to speed up.”
Here are two other ways you can “speed up” your project:
We’ve guided major health systems through hospital website redesigns using these best practices, and we can help your team with it, too. See how we helped two systems become one and delivered more traffic to their digital front door.
AUTHOR
Ahava is a leading expert in healthcare content strategy and is recognized for her ability to make complex medical information accessible. She has spent nearly two decades transforming how healthcare organizations communicate with their audiences. Ahava is trusted across the industry for her clarity, evidence-based approach, and thought leadership.
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