Know What You Want The Site To Do

I know that’s an odd title. Please bear with me.

A couple of years ago I worked with a company to create a web design for dentists that would be guaranteed to attract visitors and get good responses. We all did a lot of work on SEO and focus groups to discover what made patients want to make an appointment. If you take the time to look for dentist sites, you’ll see that a lot of them look quite the same; a style we dubbed ‘Nice And Glossy.’ Unfortunately, our research found that these types of sites often don’t perform well at all. ie. they don’t get people to take action and contact them for an appointment. You see, most people do not choose the dentist with the most ‘expensive’ looking site. They choose the dentist that looks most empathetic. Really.

It turns out that the toughest part in starting a Dentist Web Site business is not developing the site, it’s convincing dentists to abandon ‘Nice And Glossy’ look in favour of a research-based design. Now in a previous article I divided most web sites into four types.

In this case the dentists (along with many other site owners) conflate the Credibility aspect with the Advertising aspect, ie. that an impressive look automatically makes for the most responses. Which as I said is just not true. However when you show them this fact, many dentists will still insist on the traditional Nice And Glossy look. I can’t totally blame them. Dentists are trained in science, but dentists are also selling appearance. It can be hard to ask a person to give up the Nice And Glossy look when it feels correct.

The moral of the story is: know what you want the site to really do. For some dentists, advertising is not a big issue, but their image (Credibility) most definitely is. But for others, those trying to build a practice in an increasingly competitive market, you should be willing to follow the data; not ‘the crowd’.