4 Best Practices of Web Design for Hospice
Boost your hospice care business online by optimizing a responsive website design, building solid SEO foundations, streamlining site navigation, and managing scalable coding. Get help from WebFX experts.
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insights from 98,500+ hours of hospice marketing experience
To grow your business in the hospice care industry, you need a website that helps you build more awareness of your services. Since your site’s design leads to 94% of first impressions, you should implement the best web development and maintenance practices available to attract readers.
Whether you’re creating a digital presence for the first time or upgrading your current site, representing your business in an appealing and user-friendly way online helps you generate more leads of potential patients.
Keep reading to learn the four best practices of web design for hospice care. You can also subscribe to our free newsletter, Revenue Weekly, to receive the latest tips and marketing strategies delivered straight to your inbox!
1. Optimize a responsive design
A site should deliver the best experience on any device, whether the user has a PC or a mobile phone. Developers can implement a responsive design that adapts content to various mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and smart TVs.
You can either pay a web developer to design various Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) settings or learn how to edit and change the variables yourself. Some customizations include screen size, orientation, color capability, resolution, and other device characteristics.
To check if your website uses a responsive design, you should:
- Go to your website in Google Chrome.
- Open Chrom DevTools by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I.
- Toggle the device toolbar by pressing Ctrl + Shift + M.
- View how your site appears in desktop, tablet, and mobile perspectives.
When you ensure all devices optimally portray your site’s design, you’ll impress potential patients or their family members as they’re researching hospice services and visiting your site for the first time.
2. Build a strong foundation of SEO
If you want people searching for hospice care to find your site organically, you should aim to reach the top page of search engine results pages (SERPs), where 95% of site traffic comes from. Your web development practices play a key role in your Google ranking against other home, nursing home, or community living arrangement services.
Specifically, web developers have an opportunity to improve search engine optimization (SEO) with organized coding because a clean design helps site visitors and crawlers find what they’re looking for quickly.
Implement these practices of SEO in web designs for your hospice company’s site:
- Design your URLs with relevant keywords.
- Make your image alt attributes descriptive.
- Create unique metadata for every page on your site.
- Place CSS and JavaScript outside of your HTML document.
- Label a <h1> tag for the main topic of a page.
- Label other content hierarchy from <h2> through <h6>.
- Identify the structure for headings, paragraphs, and links.
- Use a robots.txt file to hide pages you don’t want indexed.
- Password-protect or use XAMPP or WampServer when testing.
When learning how to construct your business’s hospice site, you should follow World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for application development. Several hundred organizations from IT-related industries keep the information updated with the practices developers should follow.
3. Streamline a patient’s navigation
When someone visits your site to learn about your hospice services, they’ll look for your rates, the types of assistance you offer, and reviews. If they can’t find the information they need quickly, they’ll leave to find answers from a different provider.
Getting users to stay on your pages long enough to convert requires an optimized navigation setup for your site. While there are different ways to organize and label your pages, top navigation bars are the most popular option for businesses. Ultimately, how you set up your pages should allow a site visitor to explore with ease.
Create an easy digital journey for those looking for caregiver services by implementing the following:
- Set your navigation labels in a horizontal line at the top of the page.
- Only set up side navigation if you have a few page options, so it looks minimal.
- Create a drop-down menu to organize several pages under a category.
- Use legible fonts, sizing, and coloring for fast readability.
- Choose descriptive and specific labeling.
Generally, your content above the fold on your landing page should provide the essential information about your specialty care first, with other information like benefits and testimonials provided further down the page. Include clear and persuasive calls to action (CTAs) so older adults or family members understand how to contact you.
4. Manage scalable coding
If you plan on expanding your hospice services, you might want to create pages for each location. Multi-location businesses in the caregiving industry need a digital marketing strategy tailored for all their pages to attract more patients in each area.
On the web development side, you can work smarter rather than harder by using tools to create similar structures. Keep in mind your new pages might relay the same information, but make sure they don’t appear as identical or duplicate content on more recent pages.
When you need to develop more pages, plan to cut down your web development time with these methods:
- Use pre-packaged coding to save time writing and testing new codes.
- Invest in an Integrated Development environment (IDE) to access needed tools.
- Author codes in components using modularization rather than large files.
- Debug issues with Web Developer and Firebug tools for your browser.
- Create a Database Access Class for data rendering, querying, and connection.
- Make collaboration easier with Lighthouse, activeCollab, and Basecamp tools.
- Incorporate many languages with Hot Scripts in pre-written formats.
To rank well on each location page, consider using a single domain and develop individual pages for each area. A subfolder or subdomain can manage unique content beyond a contact page so you can geographically target portions of your site without needing to manage several sites.
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Learn More About Our Web Design Services
Want help with web design for your hospice business?
If you’d like to build an optimized website for your hospice services, let the experts at WebFX help. Our knowledgeable and experienced team of developers can create a website from the ground up or provide upgrades and renovations suited to your site’s needs.
So far, we’ve optimized over 1,600 websites for clients with award-winning tactics to build a trustworthy and reputable brand, improve your prospects for patients, and generate more revenue from increased services. We can develop an innovative and effective hospice site for you.
To get started, request a free proposal today!
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