The Plastic Surgeon Website: Building A Visitor-Friendly Site

Part of creating a successful plastic surgeon website is building a site that is visitor-friendly. This is very important because Internet users have a lot of choices. If they don't like your site, they'll simply move on to another site. The most common things that prove annoying to users include sites with slow-loading pages, sites that are difficult or confusing to use, and sites which do not provide the information as promised. Whether you're designing your website from scratch or redesigning an existing one, the following are tips that can help you to ensure that your site is a visitor-friendly one:

• Remember the purpose of your site. It's important that you have a clear understanding of your site's purpose. Most likely you're aiming to sell your services, but also to inform your potential patients. This purpose must be consistent with your website design.
• Remember your visitors. Consider how visitors to your site both existing and potential patients will actually use your site. Why are they visiting your site? What are their needs and can you meet their needs? Make sure that your website is designed with your visitors in mind.
• Keep it simple. In most cases, simplicity is best. If you're ever in doubt, go with simplicity over complexity. Remember what your visitors want, informative content for example, or a surgeon they can trust. Complex animated graphics and other multimedia aren't necessary if they're not serving an actual purpose.
• Create a visually appealing design. Because the design of your site is the first thing that visitors see and take in, it's important that it be visually appealing and encourage them to continue on your site. It's important to keep the design simple and uncluttered, but do provide some elements for visual interest. Pay careful attention to your choice of colors, font type, images, graphics and layout. Also be sure to keep your design consistent throughout the whole of your site.
• Make your navigation easy. Your navigation system must be easy to use, intuitive, and logical. The most important and most sought-after information must be easy to find. Navigation buttons and link names must be clearly defined and links must be regularly checked and kept up-to-date. Make sure that your visitors can easily and quickly find the information that they're looking. If necessary, provide a site map and even a search feature to increase usability.
• Ensure that your pages are quick to load. It's very important that your pages load quickly. Pages sizes must be kept to a reasonable size, and you must use your images and other graphics wisely and optimize them for quick downloads. Overly large pages should be broken up into multiple pages.
• Test your website. It's important that you test how your website appears and functions in multiple browsers, at multiple screen resolutions, and on multiple operating systems. Your site must look and function properly for the majority of users, and these are no longer just Internet Explorer users but also Firefox, Opera and Netscape users.
• Provide useful, valuable and relevant content. Many visitors to your site will be searching for information about plastic surgery procedures. Give it to them. Make sure that it is useful, valuable content, and don't include content that isn't relevant to your site's purpose. Also be sure to keep your content is kept current with frequent updates.
• Help your visitors out. Provide your visitors with helpful elements like a FAQ, help pages, privacy policy, site map and so on.
• Encourage easy contact. Encourage your visitors to contact you and make it easy for them to do so. Include some contact information, your telephone number and email contact at a minimum, on every page of your website. Also include a link to your contact page in your main navigation menu, and have all necessary information on your contact page along with a contact form or mailto link. You can also encourage contact with a Q&A or forum. It's also important to acknowledge customer contact by including a thank you' page or pop-up after they complete or submit a form to let them know that you have received their communication.
• Make your site error-free. Be sure to regularly check your pages for any errors, including coding errors, spelling and grammar errors, broken links and the like. Make sure that you find and fix errors quickly.