During many hospital and healthcare website redesigns, content takes a backseat to flashy design and functionality. When you let content lead instead, you’ll produce a smooth user experience and a superior website.
Content & User Experience
A good user experience depends on quality content. Content is the reason users come to your website. Count anything on your website—text, images, audio, and video—that communicates a message to your audience as content.
When you let content guide your website redesign, you give users valuable information and improve the overall user experience. This strategic approach can help your brand and website stand out. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, a leader in user experience research, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
Take advantage of your healthcare website redesign process to deliver a better digital user experience. Content plays an important role in your user experience and informs design and functionality by presenting text that is:
- Organized with meaningful messages
- Easy to read and scannable
- User focused and benefit driven
- Optimized for conversion with calls to action
When you get the user experience right, you’re building a relationship and becoming a trusted source of information and services. That means your users will turn to your website instead of a competitor’s site.
What’s Driving Your Website Redesign?
Start your planning process with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your redesign. Your website objectives may include:
- Improving user experience
- Establishing governance
- Aligning with changing business goals
- Implementing a new content management system
- Shifting from locations focus to a system-wide approach
Craft a Core Strategy Statement
Once you understand the purpose of your redesign, write a core strategy statement for your project to keep you focused throughout the process. Your statement will help you define the purpose of your website and explain it to others in your organization.
Use your core strategy statement to support the content strategy and development choices you make. Refer to your statement to discourage requests that don’t match your purpose and could sidetrack your project.
Figure Out the Goals for Your Redesign
Invite your stakeholders to give you feedback on your current website content and site structure. Ask:
- What’s working well?
- What needs improvement?
- Who’s the target audience? Are there other audiences?
- What are the top tasks for your audiences?
- What are our organizational strengths or competitive advantages?
- What goals do you have for a redesigned website?
- How will you know if the website redesign is a success?
The insights you gain from your stakeholders should influence your site structure, content strategy, and content development. Whatever the reasons for your redesign, developing good content is critical to achieving success.
When you identify new goals for your website redesign, make sure your content strategy and development address them. For example, if your healthcare system is integrating its medical group into the organization’s main website, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy for how to add the medical group information and create content about the medical group and doctor profiles.
Evaluate Your Current Content
Run an inventory and audit of your current website’s content. After you have a good understanding of your existing content, decide if it content aligns with your redesign goals and speaks to your target audience. Review:
- Calls to action
- Page structure and linking
- Relevance
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and metadata
- Use of videos, PDFs, and images
- Voice and tone
After your content audit, you’ll be able to identify content gaps and opportunities for streamlining or creating content during your redesign. For example, if some content is old or outdated, archive it. Or if medical service lines are missing, add them.
Analyze Your Website Data
Dig into the data from your current website to determine which content and calls to action are engaging your site users. What are the most popular pages? What are users searching for on your site? How do users find your website? Google Analytics or similar tools can help you track this information. Tools like heat maps, scroll maps, user testing, and more can help you understand user behavior.
Apply what you learn from your analysis to your content strategy. When you make decisions based on data, not hunches, you can meet your organization’s goals and provide users with easy access to the content they need.
For example, if you find that urgent care has a high number of page views, consider this data and your other marketing goals to help determine if your urgent care service line and locations need a larger presence on your website. Focusing your content strategy and aligning it with your business goals can help increase conversions and revenue.
Organize Your Content
Content strategy ensures your website has a structure that supports your goals, addresses the needs of your target audiences, and supports user tasks.
Make your website navigation straightforward and easy for users to follow. Label navigation items clearly, using terms your target audience understands. Group related items together in a navigation structure so the users can see the relationships and make the correct choices.
Prioritize the needs of your users by organizing content in a way that makes sense to a patient, instead of following your internal department structure. And make high-priority content easy to find.
Plan & Create the Right Content
A content-heavy website doesn’t always translate into useful information to your user. Just because you can publish pages of information doesn’t mean you should. Before you create any content, determine its purpose and target audience, as well as the message you want to convey. Make sure your content is compatible with your site’s core strategy statement and goals.
Consider whether you need to rewrite, revise, or create new content for your redesign. You may need a combination of these approaches. At a minimum, you’ll want to update and refresh your content for:
- Voice and tone
- Writing quality
- Readability
- Relevance and accuracy
- Proper page metadata
- SEO and keyword usage
If you don’t have the time, web expertise, or resources to tackle comprehensive content strategy and content development during your website redesign, collaborate with Geonetric.
