How to set up your website: web designers and web developers

In this final article of the series I will cover off the options where you entrust a substantial part of your process to professionals - no need to become an expert. 

Web Designer

This option should be taken if you do not wish to get into any of the technical aspects regarding a website. Basically you brief a web designer on your concept, you provide some content and they design and deliver a completed fully functional website. You should ask them to explain how changes can be made in the future and understand whether you will need them to make these changes for you. 

Sometimes web designers have more marketing related skills and can actually write your website content (or rewrite it) based on information you provide.  Those with skills solely in writing web content are called copywriters.

Advantages: Often the fastest way of getting your complete website up and it will look professional.

Disadvantages: The most expensive; it might be hard to make changes

Web Developers

Web developers typically have different skills to web designers. They can program and write software for your website. You would need these skills if you want to set up a complex websites running a database and integrating it into an online shopping cart. 

Advantages: Can create a very customised, interactive and unique website

Disadvantages: May be costly

Once you have your web presence you need to then think about how you promote it. I'll talk through some of the options for this in subsequent posts including search engine optimisation, and online advertising.

Articles in this series: Options, Hosted Pages and Blogs, Websites, Web Designers and Developers.

How to set up your website: The website option

A website can give you the most flexibility about how you present your information to the world. At its most primitive you need a web hosting provider who provides you some space on their servers. You then use a tool to put your content on these servers. Sometimes this is supplemented with tools that enable you to easily author content but usually you need to find other tools to create your website pages. Some webhosts include a free domain name which you can use to identify your website and others provide you with some advanced tools to run databases or scripts to create feature rich webpages. 

Most advanced features are irrelevant if you only want to create a basic website with information for your patients. Similarly you will not require huge amounts of disk space or large download limits. Factor these out of your consideration.

Note: There are lots of web hosting companies some of which are very small and may not be in business for long. Try to pick a provider that has some substance or has an exceptional reputation for service and value.

Below are some different types of website hosting:

Free Websites

Examples: Weebly, Webs, Google Sites (although it is really aimed at intranets - websites for a defined user group)

Advantages: Free (for basic functionality or upgrade and pay), may be appropriate for a simple site, may include design templates and a content management system, a good way of seeing if you really want to set up the website yourself.

Disadvantages: Usually has a limit to the number of pages or limits how you can structure information, you can't run complex scripts or databases, service may be in beta (ie not 100% reliable), risk of company going out of business if no obvious revenue stream.

US Hosted website - These tend to be cheaper than hosting in Australia although your Australian visitors may experience a greater delay in retrieving information as it has to be sent from the US to Australia.  

Examples: BlueHost, Dreamhost, AnHosting, Go Daddy

Advantages: Cheap, includes more storage than Australian counterparts.

Disadvantages: May be slower for Australian visitors, support may be hard to get, watch out for USD conversion rates - you may end up paying more than you expect when you factor in credit card surcharges for foreign currency transactions.

Basic website 

Web hosting providers often try to provide an entry level offering as a teaser from which they hope you will upgrade as your business grows or you hit the limitations of their basic package.

Examples: Hostess, WhiteDog GreenFrog

Advantages: Cheaper than a full package.

Disadvantages: May not provide enough space for your content.

Complete package - A complete package may include content authoring services, database support and scripting.

Examples: BigPond, NetRegistry, Melbourne IT 

Advantages: Allows you to run whatever you need on the website

Disadvantages: Most expensive, require understanding of technical aspects to get value for money, may be beyond most practice's needs.

Articles in this series: Options, Hosted Pages and Blogs, Websites, Web Designers and Developers.

How to set up your website: The hosted page or blog option

Following on from the previous article about the options for an online presences for health professionals here is some detail about hosted pages and blogs for medical professionals.

A hosted page for medical professionals 

This option involves providing your content to a third party and listing it on an online directory or free listing service. The format is often prescriptive and limited.

Examples: Health Directory, Yellow Pages, Enterprise Search

Advantages: cheap (often free), profiles your page amongst a community of other (relevant sites).

Disadvantages: least flexible, you can't use your own domain name, you can't edit the structure of the pages.

A blog for health professionals

A blog or weblog is basically a website built around the metaphor of a diary. You write an entry in your diary daily, weekly or monthly. The most recent entry is displayed first. Usually a blog is used to start a two way conversation with an audience. The same technology however can be used to present information that is not updated frequently such as practice contact details etc. 

Examples: Blogger, WordPress 

Advantages: cheap (sometimes free), blogs are often found more easily by search engines because of their fresh content, provides a 2 way dialog

Disadvantages: is clumsy in handling large amounts of infrequently changing information

Note: some allow you to bring your own domain name (cost $15-$30/yr) so that if in the future you wish to move your content or set up a fully fledged website you can.

In the next article in the series I'll touch upon a range of web hosting options.

Online Marketing Guide on a Page - HTML/linked version

Online Marketing Guide on a Page is now available in a HTML linked version.

After experimenting with several different ways of doing it I've opted to leave it as a Google document rather than posting it to the blog. This removes the need for extensive reformatting. 

The key benefits of the online version is that it contains direct links to content on the blog that expands on the theme. It doesn't have the graphical page although I've set up several links from the categories that give a screenshot of the application I've talked about along with a link and key features eg for Online Directories and Webmaster Tools.

The PDF version of Online Marketing Guide on a Page is still available.

Do you know how to set up a website? The options

If don't have a website yet I'll go through a few options available to you for setting up a presence online focusing on relative cost and complexity.

Specifically I will cover hosted pages (ie listing on a directory), a blog, various options for websites, web designers and web developers.

The best way to start is often to look at what other doctors and physicians are doing with their websites and then define your vision relative to an existing website. Two key aspects are the look and feel of the site and the types of information you wish to publish. Have a look. If you need some ideas look at some of the medical sites on the DMOZ directory - search under your specialty and have a look around.

I could provide the normal list of technical aspects you should look at for a website but the truth is most of the technical aspects are jargon used to try to complicate your decision. You wouldn't expect a patient to understand technical medical terms and neither should you have to understand the jargon of the web.

Key criteria in setting up an online presence

Here are the key aspects to consider:

• ability to use your own domain name so you can take your business elsewhere in the future and still be found
  
• ability to enter meta information like a page description on each page so search engines can more easily find you
  
• design templates for the layout of your site to make your site look professional even if you are building the website yourself
  
• a way of easily editing/updating content as things change, particularly if you have lots of content. This is often referred to as a content management system (CMS).
  
• whether you want email, phone or in person support if you run into trouble with your website.
  
• whether there are any specific tools you want to run eg PHP (a programming language), Joomla (CMS), Drupal (CMS), WordPress (blogging platform), a MySQL or SQL database, etc.
  
• whether setting up your website will affect your existing email address and whether you want to use this to move your mail to a new personalised domain name eg person@organisationname.com.au.
  
• the value of your time - do you have the time to put into learning this technology and will you get enjoyment out of the process?
  

The last question is probably the key one. Do you really want to do this yourself or get someone else to provide you a finished product?

While you are looking at some examples of websites look down the bottom of their main page and you might even find the organisation that they used to develop their website to give you an idea of what choices they made.

More to come in subsequent articles.

Online and offline marketing ideas

Following on from the last post have a look at this useful Google funded site which tries to help you through the issues of building a marketing plan and analysing the likely return you can get. Through a 10 step process that takes about 20-30 minutes it will explain some of the key concepts about search engine marketing. It also walks you through what you need to do to set up a website if you aren't even at that step yet.

Of course it also tries to make you a Google Adwords convert. Be warned!

http://www.trysearchmarketing.com.au/

In doing my own research I walked into a newsagent the other day and lo and behold there were 5 publications claiming to deal with pregnancy and pregnancy related advice! It is fascinating to see there is so much marketing money being spent funding these magazines. Although not directly competing a lot of the advertising dollars also end up finding their way online and competing for Adwords keywords! Damn those pharmaceutical companies... :-)

Overview of steps to promote the website

Okay. Enough background for the moment. What specifically have we done to publicise the website so far:

1. we've put the web address on cards, stationery, etc (not so great at getting new patients but certainly reminds everyone you deal with that you have a website).
2. I've submitted the site to a number of free web directories (both health related and general)
3. we've hired a company to do copywriting for the site, developing the content and some basic search engine optimisation (this really gave us a great base on which to build)
4. I've read a lot about search engine optimisation (probably not enough but you could spend your entire life trying to understand the latest and greatest techniques to make your site search engine friendly)
5. I've dabbled with Google Adwords (ie actually paying Google to promote the website when people search for certain terms)
6. I've spend an inordinate amount of time optimising the website - looking at search engine rankings, Google Adwords keywords and generally mucking about on the content of the website

There are a few other things we've done but let's work through these first to keep the narrative in some kind of order. At the end I'll try to sum up on the most effective measures I've found.

By the way the website is Obstetrics & Gynaecology Consulting Group (http://www.ogcg.com.au). Have a look and tell me what you think - it will change quite frequently as I continue to implement some of the techniques I have learnt and try new things. It is our guinea pig for measuring some real before and after scenarios.

Why bother having a website?

This may sound like a fairly trivial question but for a medical website is quite fundamental. Do medical practitioners really need to have a website and for what purpose?

For an established GP there really may be no need: there is a steady stream of patients (perhaps too many?), people know where to find you (the result of a considerable marketing investment over time if you really think about it - whether paid or through word of mouth) and perhaps your patients wouldn't bother ever visiting your website if you had one.

For others a website forms part of a critical part of their business and means of communication to patients and prospective patients. Some things your medical website might do include:

• provide contact details, opening hours and after hours contacts
• provide details about the doctor(s) in the practice, specialty or interests
• provide general information about conditions and treatment options
• provide forms to print and complete before coming into the clinic

Being fairly web savvy and dealing with a group of younger practitioners the idea of a website for a newly established practice (albeit with some experienced practitioners) was an obvious and attractive one. This is not to say that older practitioners can't benefit from having one. They can and do - I'll provide some examples of this later.

Undeniably this represents an opportunity for doctors in general to increase the size of their practice and to provide better communication to patients. The question is - do you want or need to? You should have a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve before embarking on this journey otherwise you are likely to lose interest when the bills start coming in and you get busy on other things.

In the beginning was the egg. And that egg was called...

After some consideration I've decided to talk about my experience in trying to evolve a medical website into something that not only provides information to potential patients but also generates business for its owners. There are probably some wider lessons here for websites in general but I'm going to try to stay focused on what I have learnt - a medical website in Australia.

First, some disclaimers:
1) I am not a medical practitioner - but married to one. (Otherwise I wouldn't have the time to take up such a frivolous task - and that was a reference to how devoted they are to their jobs in case it was ambiguous).
2) I'm not a web marketing or search engine optimisation (SEO) expert - in fact I have no marketing qualifications at all - but on the flip side I'm also not trying to sell you anything.

So what do I have to share?
We'll over the last few months I've learnt quite a bit about a few different topics including setting up a website, promoting a website and generating traffic. If you are interested in these topics seeing some real statistics and results, and tips that really work read on...