Webside Manner: How Friendly is Your Web Site?

Ben Wilkins / May 8th / Comments

In today’s age where technology is king, a Web site is often the first chance to make a good impression. Yet more times than not I see companies, practices, and even health systems pay little to no attention to their Web site. I see content that is outdated, images that are no longer relevant, and even incorrect information, such as addresses, phone numbers, or staff personnel.

When properly created and maintained, a Web site can provide tremendous value to your patients and visitors, even beyond the information it serves. Web sites that are easy to use and intuitive to the person viewing it give the impression that your company or practice will be the same way. Web sites that are cluttered and difficult to use provide frustration to the person viewing it, leaving them with a bad feeling about your organization.

5 Usability Killers

1. Broken Links. Nothing is more frustrating than intentionally clicking on a link only to end up on an error page. Broken links to pages, images, and style sheets will kill Web site usability and increase bounce rates faster than anything else. The W3C has a free tool that validates not only links, but images, style sheets, and javascripts. While tools like this are not a “cure-all,” they do provide a good place to start.

2. Under Construction Pages. I think the rule is don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever take a page live that is unfinished. Or is there one more “ever”? I can’t remember. Anyway, you get the point. If a page is “under construction,” don’t allow people to it. Take the links down and take the page down until the page is finished.

If there is a very rare case where you just HAVE to take a page live that isn’t finished, put a specific date telling exactly when you will have the page up. “Coming Soon!” doesn’t help the viewer at all. How soon is soon? An hour? A day? A week? A month? Instead, “Coming Soon! Please visit us again on June 1, 2009!” tells viewers not to waste their time until June 1, and will actually create a higher return rate for that page.

3. Non-descriptive Links. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve seen multiple sites with links titled “Information.” Information about what? Information about the company? Information about their services? Information about their prices? I could go on, but you get the idea. Be as descriptive as possible in the text of your links. “Our History” works better for a page containing the history of the company than “About Us.”

Going even further, link titles are very important to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want to improve your rank in search results, start by replacing link text such as “Contact Us” with “Contact Dearwood Medical Group.” Search engines relate that link with your actual practice, as opposed to “us,” which doesn’t tell them anything.

4. Missing Links (or buried pages). Making the viewers of your Web site use the back button of their browser is a big mistake. As a general rule of thumb, a viewer should be able to get to the content they want in no more than two clicks. It’s frustrating for viewers to navigate to a page only to find a completely different navigation bar. Instead, use what I call “Global Navigation” and “Local Navigation.” Global Navigation contains the links that should remain on every single page of the Web site. For example, “Home, Services, Careers, Blog, Contact Dearwood Medical Group” would all be included in Global Navigation. Local Navigation would include links relative to the global section the viewer is on.

5. Outdated or Incorrect Content. Web pages that have a blog, newsroom, Twitter feed, or any other sort of dynamic content must be updated consistently. I’d even go as far as informing viewers how often they can expect it to be updated (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) If a viewer goes to a page with dynamic content and the last time it was updated was March 2003, they will wonder if you are even still in business. If you don’t have time to update it, take it down. Don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favor of dynamic content and the value it provides to the viewers. But it isn’t worth having it on your Web site if it won’t get updated.

How friendly is your Web site? If you haven’t taken the time to examine your own Web site recently (meaning in the last 6 months or longer), now is the time to do so.