Web Site Development

Your web site is today’s portal to your practice.

In a website, there are three rules that should not be broken:

• It must be easy to navigate,
• any user must be able to find the before and after pictures within 3 seconds after landing on your site,
• on every page there needs to be a telephone number and an email address where you can be reached.

Look at your web site and determine how many of these three rules you follow. The more you follow, the more successful your web site serves you as a marketing tool. Of course there are many other rules that also need to be observed but let’s use these three rules to explain our position.

Simplicity:

Although when Thoreau said, “simplify, simplify, simplify,” he was mostly addressing himself to future hippies, we would like to usurp his words to make a point about web site navigation. There are many web sites that have been designed for plastic surgeons that might win awards as works of art, but they are mostly useless as marketing tools. Imagine what would happen to you if each time you went to your grocery store, they changed the aisles where they stocked their groceries. Obviously, on each visit, you would have to spend time to find out where to find the fresh produce, the dairy products, the frozen food, etc. In web site design there are certain conventions that we all have learned since the advent of the Internet, and we do not wish to relearn how to navigate a website every time we visit a new site. The idea is to be able to find what we want in the shortest time possible. If you do not follow these rules and conventions, a user will click away from your site and look somewhere else.

PSPM Website: Independence from IT Updates

Our sites are designed to let you manage your site without help from technical people. If you can manage you Facebook page, you will find managing your PSPM website even easier. You don't need to know HTML code, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, or have any technical abilities. Any employee on your staff can become the website coordinator...guaranteed.

There are just too many features to name them all here, but here are the most important ones:

--Pictures can be resized to fit any page

--Picture sizes are minimized to speed up downloads

--Office coordinates are on every page

--Every page is optimized as a landing page for Google SEO and Google Adwords saving you $$$ in advertising

--Patients have personal directions from their home to your office

--QR codes on every page allow instant capture of your address, phone, email address with any smart phone

--Social Media links can be added or deleted with 1 click

--Patient Google maps can be added for any location

--Patient PDF files for patients can be added with 1 click

--Online filling of patient PDF files is an option

--HIPPA compliant secure emails is standard

--Videos can be added to any site page with 1 click

--Website's main tabs can be changed, deleted, or increased by user as well as all sub tabs to create or delete any site page

--Before and after galleries are esaily created or modified

--New pages for special events or promotions can be added or deleted from the site easily

Before & After Pictures

In 2010, web site before and after pictures are mandatory. Playing with smoke and mirrors, using stock photos, or telling viewers that your site is under repair might work if you’re the only plastic surgeon in town, but even then, we would not advise it. The Internet has changed the world making consumers more informed, more wary, and much more sophisticated about what is available. You cannot market to Internet users with mediocre before and after pictures.

If all your good pictures are in an album tucked away in a drawer, you need to get them out, have them digitized, and put them on your web site. More importantly, you need to take pictures of all your patients before surgery. This will not just protect you from law suits, but if you have a viable patient follow-up system and also take pictures at 30 days, 3 months and 1 year post-op, you are building your picture inventory. Also don’t forget that you need to get letters of consent signed at 30 days post op when your patients are the happiest. At 6 month and 1 year post op, if they make their visit, they are much less likely to sign these consent forms. Note also that these pictures cannot be hidden away on a part of your web site that only you and your web designer know about. Americans invented instant gratification and the Internet has aggravated this condition with what we call A.D.D. web site searching. If they can’t find those pictures in 3 seconds, they will often click the back browser button and go find another site with pictures. Finally, if a picture is truly worth 1000 words, and if the average American reads at a 7th grade level, they need to see the pictures NOW!

Phone numbers & Email Links

Phone numbers & Email Links need to be on every page both at the top of the page and at the bottom if your pages have a lot of content. You cannot plan when or where the reader will find something on your site that whispers in his/her ear, “contact them.” It’s like the check out aisle at the grocery store; they don’t put staples there, just cheap high margin instant gratification products that people reach for without thinking. Calling your office is an emotional decision, it’s not based on reason alone because they don’t know you yet and they must therefore make a leap of faith. If your contact information is not there, and if they change their minds, you will not get a call. Finally, if they do call, you need to have someone answer the phone 24/7 who can assuage their emotions that they made a great decision to call you. If you have a voice mail that says that your office doesn’t open until 9 AM, you may have just lost $25,000.

Email pages need to be simple, with drop down menu selections, and just enough information so that a visitor can still keep their privacy.

It’s important that you not ask for information that they might not yet feel comfortable to give you. With plastic surgery, privacy is not just important because of HIPAA, but also because prospective patients often don’t want others to know that they want surgery. Keep this in mind when you create your contact page and remember that they need to email from your site, not their email address, and that if it takes them longer than 3 minutes to fill out your email form, they may never click the send button.