In the first of a four-part series looking at the communication elements of the patient journey, Nick Russon starts with the pivotal role of the practice website.
The dental profession is growing to understand that in order to provide best practice, the patient journey from enquiry to treatment needs to be seamless. That takes the dental team beyond the clinical and into the realms of effective communication that often starts with the practice website.
You should view the website as one of the first chances that a practice will get to make an impression on potential patients, who will expect to learn more about who you are, what you do, and how well you do it – a view shared by Krishan Joshi, CEO of web design company Dental Focus, one of our long-standing partners.
Setting standards
What’s more, the standard of the website – rightly or wrongly – is perceived to reflect the standards and principles of the practice. For example, is your website modern, mobile-friendly and easy to use, or is
it outdated?
Even when websites have some of the attributes mentioned, there may well be room for improvement. For example, nowadays many visitors to your website will prefer to see animations and videos over and above any text.
At Medivision, we’ve been able to measure that the average time spent on a page populated with our animations is double that of a comparable treatment page that is more text heavy.
A new generation
With modern technology comes new patient expectations and these can sometimes take resources away from your dental team. Quite understandably, when time is short the practice prioritises clinical care and often pushes the website review and administration to one side.
However, Medivision’s website animations offer a novel way of adding life and movement to your website, whether your patient is viewing at home on their PC or in the park on their iPad. This is a quick and effortless way to improve the educational content and engagement level of treatment pages, as it requires just one line of code for each animation.
One line of code – ‘what?’ – I hear you exclaim. Worry not, because professional web developers can take that job away from you, adding to the mix their own understanding of the benefits of such animations in terms of the patients’ attention, keeping people on the website, achieving high rankings on search engines, and so on. So, a site populated with these increasingly popular animations requires little to no input from the dental team.
If you would like to know more about how Medivision animations can help you to create an eye-catching window to your practice and communicate more effectively with patients, visit www.medivision.co.uk, email [email protected] or call 01908 265 565.
