* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf
Hello, everyone. I'm Stewart Gandolf. Welcome to what makes a health care website Great and how to get one. I'm looking forward to working with you this morning on this. In California, at least blustery day. Today we're going to talk about this is a topic that I thought would be fun because there's a lot of attendees have probably gone through website builds.

Stewart Gandolf
Some have not been involved with very large ones. I've been rather small, but there's a lot of questions that remain about websites and how to do this right and how to choose a good website. What really matters? What can you do on the front end to prepare for the back end and to do this really thoughtfully and websites are as important, are very important as we will soon discuss.

Stewart Gandolf
And so this is based upon best practices, working with hundreds of websites over the years as we create them for our clients. Questions that come up a lot we tried to answer today, so I hope you'll really enjoy and find this session useful. So I'm going to start off by talking about some quick introductions. We're going to start off by talking about the what makes the website great, how to create great website, how to project initiation, planning, the site architecture, content plan, design, development and launch.

Stewart Gandolf
And so without further ado, let's get into it. Okay, so much like there you go. I'm Stewart Kennard, CEO of Healthcare Success. I've been doing this for a while now. I started this company about 18 years ago, and before that I worked in the business in health care. I do a lot of writing and speaking and talking on this topic, but I'm heavily involved with the creative on most of our clients projects, so I'll be providing some tips about the how this all works.

Stewart Gandolf
And I'm an esteemed colleague here. Brett will be joining me, Brett as creative director of Design. Brett has done some fantastic work with us and for our clients. So when we get to the design part, he'll be attending our presenting. Right? So Brett, welcome this morning.

Brett Maurer
Likewise. And hi everybody.

Stewart Gandolf
So just as a reminder, we are a health care marketing agency, so everything from our point of view is delivered around creating things that actually generate results. So whether it's a B2B site or a B to C site, we're really focused on, you know, what is the purpose, how we drive results, whatever those results might be. We're a leading agency in this space.

Stewart Gandolf
And as I mentioned a moment ago, we do a lot of these. So let's start off by talking about what makes a website for us. The first thing is to keep in mind that your website is truly your digital front door. It used to be your front door was your front door, but now today, your physical front door, although many of you have a lot of front doors right out of multiple locations, but the first experience of most patients or clients or consumers is your website so often that you don't finish looking up your address when they've been referred to you.

Stewart Gandolf
They find you online if they're checking you out or they're deciding to use you from their insurance plan. The website is the first impression. So clearly want to do a good job there. That's really important. But if that wasn't enough, typically if you're doing marketing, it's the center of everything. You really can't do much online without having a good website.

Stewart Gandolf
So yeah, there might be landing pages once in a while or so forth. But really for most campaigns it's the epicenter of our marketing. So I would urge you to think about your website to urge to be deserve the investment, because you know, if that's a weak link in your marketing chain, everything else just sort of falls apart, which would make sense to you.

Stewart Gandolf
So the first thing is that, you know, what are our objectives for website? Why are we doing this at all? What are you you know, what is the point of doing a website from your point of view? Let's get started here. First of all, we want to make sure that your website or when you're doing a website, you're thinking about appealing to all of your target audiences.

Stewart Gandolf
So that could include your customers, you know, job candidates. You know, people are typically we're looking to recruit these days investors, donors, analysts and especially Google. So right from the start, you have multiple, typically multiple objectives and multiple target audiences for your website. The second thing is to generate typically inquiries or direct sales. Most of the time, most of the clients we work with are trying to get some action from users where generate an inquiry book, an appointment sells something.

Stewart Gandolf
There is a reason why we want to have that website be successful. Third thing is to again as the center point of your marketing to enhance, reflect, amplify your brand. It's a really critical part of your brand. Most of our clients are take branding very seriously. They recognize that the business that they're in is larger than the sum of its parts.

Stewart Gandolf
What is our image? What is our brand message? How do we reflect that? And again, if you're a website, soft touch, that's the epicenter of everything kind of a problem, right? Educate the public. It's funny, when Web sites first came out, everybody wanted to educate the public. We still do with blogs and for search engine optimization, we recognize that our job is and so it educate the public and other sites do that quite well.

Stewart Gandolf
For example, the Mayo Clinic. But we still want to educate the public, particularly on our own area of expertise. If you're nonprofit, soliciting donations, if you're looking to recruit new employees, as so many of our clients are these days, and then also providing is the place for people to find your their patient portal or your employee intranets, those kinds of things.

Stewart Gandolf
So think about this as we're going through this, I urge you to take some notes and think about, you know, which of these apply, what other things might apply to your business. one more thing. I jumped straight into this. We are recording a session today and we'll be sending the reporting. I will also send some helpful links with the recording.

Stewart Gandolf
You can ask questions in the Q&A, so if you have questions, please feel free to include those. And again, I recommend looking at this from an active perspective, Take notes and figure out how this applies to you. So the title of the webinar was What makes a website Great? And we talked about multiple objectives. So these are some of the things that we think makes the web sets apart one website from another, and we'll go into more detail later.

Stewart Gandolf
But this is at the high level. So the first thing is to have, as we alluded to a moment ago on brand messaging and design, so often we see people put together our website. In fact, we've done this ourselves. We've had clients who say, Yeah, branding will get to later. Right now it's on a website, so that can be done and you know, we can work with that.

Stewart Gandolf
But if you have a brand, it's really important. So those grand by the brand guidelines to be brought to life through your website, there's no better place to do that. So having on brand message, on brand design, really important and that will help your website stand out from the sea of sameness we're creating right now. A Scott three We're doing a whole new logo brand identity for a software and the practice US EMR world.

Stewart Gandolf
There's a world of sameness there. And so it is vital to go through that extra step. The President of us added We're still catching up on sleep after all that work with us, but that takes a lot to make the sea of sameness, to make it stand out. Great user experience and interface. Right will be speaking about that at length and a little bit navigation and search bar to make sure that it's an intuitive use and nothing makes people bounce more than can't finding what they need.

Stewart Gandolf
I just saw a case study yesterday from an Italian company that increased its sales by a third just by improving its navigation, but that was all they did was improve their an now. So a lot of times there are leverage points on their website when it's the better. The bad news is when you have a bad website, that's a problem.

Stewart Gandolf
The good news is that oftentimes you can leverage your results pretty quickly by fixing some of these fundamental errors, compelling content that drives users to action. So we're not just informing or trying to educate or and educating or trying to motivate. And so that's done through emotion and a lot of techniques we'll touch on some of these. Today might be a good topic to go deeper on a subsequent webinar.

Stewart Gandolf
Trustworthy. Does it give an instant feeling of trust? Does it have trust badges? Does it just feel trustworthy? Some websites just scream and you can't even tell why, but the design doesn't feel very trustworthy. And so it's really easy to have a site that is not trustworthy right from the beginning, and that's a problem. Very important. We'll discuss this in a moment.

Stewart Gandolf
As SEO is built into that website. Tragic problem we'll discuss in just a moment. Mobile responsive is table six. Today. You have to have a site that works well on mobile. Most I would say, I don't know, an average with our clients, two thirds of to 70% of my inquiries come from mobile. So oftentimes we'll think about doing a mobile design first.

Stewart Gandolf
But in any event, it has to be mobile responsive and you have to spend exactly the same amount of care on mobile as you do desktop, at least maybe more secure. So secure with just H2 setpiece, but also there may be given your business other security measures built into it timely and relevant for sure. Another thing we see ADA and HIPA compliant.

Stewart Gandolf
We'll talk about again the customized content reports, including so this means custom to you, not a bunch of things like scraped from some other website, including your messaging and including accurate medical information. We see a lot of downright plagiarism on the way on the internet. Sometimes it's unintentional, sometimes, you know, someone will hire a cheap writer and they just go scrape Mayo Clinic website and put that on your site.

Stewart Gandolf
Well, it's a real problem because you are, in fact a copy. And in fact, Google knows and Google and penalize you for having duplicate information. So we don't want to do that. And if you want to stand out and show us search engines, that requires customized health care content. Yes, I know that's more expensive, but you will need to do that if you want to stand up on the search results content management system.

Stewart Gandolf
That's fast, lightweight and responsive. Speed is really important today. And this came out about maybe four or five years ago. Google started really caring about speed, particularly in mobile, because most sites were horrible. So they changed their Google has a web page that you can test your own speeds on. It's called page speed dot web dot data, but used to be just simply web, not dead.

Stewart Gandolf
Now it's more complicated. So page speed, dot, web, dot dev, you can do an analysis. And what I would recommend doing is take go out and do that analysis. If you're not getting in the nineties on your speed, talk to your web team and take a look at that more carefully. 90th percentile conversion pass plan by segment. That means basically, you know, if you have different target audiences, where are you trying to take them, what services you're trying to get them to buy, and what exactly does that look like?

Stewart Gandolf
Landing pages designed for page search. Sometimes we do standalone free landing pages that has some advantages, and sometimes you do landing pages on a site. That's a longer discussion. I have to do that. But I guess the simple thing to say is the higher involved the product is like for example, infertility. We often find that while landing pages usually work better than landing our Web site for conversion on a high end form a decision.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes the landing page actually on the Web site matters. In any event, it gives you a lot more flexibility. So building pages on that site that are specifically designed to send page search traffic to with things like CTAs offers or calls to action and others. That's really important. A lot of times a client will come to us. They just did their Web site.

Stewart Gandolf
They say, Great, we want to start a search campaign. We're like, where exactly would you like us to send traffic to? There's no place on your site that is appropriate for that. So keep that in mind. And then for those of you that are multi-location providers. So things we see there are often really big, big mistakes in terms of getting results.

Stewart Gandolf
First of all, location providers, a separate page for every location is a 100% amongst a separate page for every provider. Even if you have 100 or 200 or 300 is a must. Making sure that you have good content for your service, for your conditions, location, a doctor finder, tools for functionality, payment insurances, and some form of appointment setting.

Stewart Gandolf
Whether that's just simply requiring by phone or form or better when possible, actual appointment setting. So those are some of the things that matter when we're doing websites. I'm sure there's others you might think of. If you have comments, feel free to put that into the Q&A. But these are some of the things that we see time and time again are really important.

Stewart Gandolf
And like I said, it's very common for people to bring us the website. They just finished with a bunch of these things message and that's super disappointing as the reason for this meeting today. Okay, so we talked about some of the factors that make a great Web site. How do you get a great Web site? And so we're going to share the process here, which, you know, it'd be pretty boring if you don't share some insights along the way.

Stewart Gandolf
So we'll try to share some insights along the way, but help you prepare, help you understand how to do all the things that are necessary to get that great Web site out of the box versus having a tragic, costly mistake afterwards. So we'll walk through that for you. So we like to divide this into bases when we talk to our clients.

Stewart Gandolf
Phase one is the project initiation and planning, and that begins before you sign a contract. So we'll talk about that in just a moment. Site architecture is often forgotten entirely by firms who don't know better. A critical phase. If that's not done right, everything else falls apart on the back end. Phase three is the content plan and execution.

Stewart Gandolf
So what are we going to do with content four as the sexy part of design, which we'll be talking about and development in launch is the phase five. It's and that's it by as five and six. By the way, everybody focuses in on that design. And while that's important, you'll notice that's number four. It's choreographed. So project initiation and planning.

Stewart Gandolf
So let's start off with some fundamentals. When you're doing this again, I hope you're taking some notes, but what are your primary objectives? Why do you want a website? That's the first thing to think about. Like, really? What is it? That's what are you trying to cover? by the way, if you are doing this, these notes would be really helpful when you work with us or some other vendor to create a website.

Stewart Gandolf
If you have notes that you share that with them. Right, there would be greatly help the process. One of the things we find that really works with clients is to ask them, So what is it you don't like about your site and why did or want to know? Right? That's one of the most important questions you can ask.

Stewart Gandolf
So people are kind of fuzzy on that. You really need to know like what exactly we're going to do before you hear about this endeavor. Is there an economic imperative to change the Web site? So this is an example. We have clients that spend way six figures, hundreds of thousands a month on page search and their website hasn't been changed for a long time.

Stewart Gandolf
And so when we see that, we often say, hey, we're going to continue to manipulate everything we can in the machine to maybe like how we're doing the bidding and all the monitoring and tracking all that. But oftentimes a huge lever is the Web site. So we can, you know, over time, well, let's say we improve over time the campaign to half the cost per conversion.

Stewart Gandolf
Oftentimes we could cut it again by half again, if the website was better. So many times if you're investing substantially in marketing, it's actually costing you a lot of money to not have a perfect Web site. Okay, that makes sense. If you're investing money to send traffic there, if your website is not up to par, it's costing you money every month.

Stewart Gandolf
I mean, not just to show it easily, but I promise you it is where your audience is very important. Again, we kind of alluded to at the very beginning patients, families, a KPIs, employees, investors, donors, Google need to really figure that out. Vital. Everything else. If you don't do this upfront, everything else will be a mistake later. Both of our team will need to be involved.

Stewart Gandolf
Websites are a political beast if we're working with like a hospital or health system. Man, A lot of people have input on that smaller business or, you know, one that's more sort of top down authoritarian. It's a little easier. But one thing I would recommend is when you decide again up front to figure out who needs to be involved, what's your decision making process going to be formalized that important?

Stewart Gandolf
Again, what's the functionality of the new website we mentioned patient find or doctor finder, for example, What kinds of functionality will you need on your site? Do you have enough budget to realistically get it done right? We oftentimes find people get really confused by a while variations on website, but I'll walk you through that a little bit to get tell you and try to explain a little bit more timeline.

Stewart Gandolf
Another question is how do your website compare to your competitors? It's hard. Look objectively at your competitors and see what they're doing and you're not. What are some websites you like and don't like? Why? This is something that we ask their clients. Typically, it's really helps us with the creative just to get a sense of what they're looking for.

Stewart Gandolf
Now, we do care about our clients personal taste, but we also care a lot about the market. So we want it when we're whoever is working with you needs to really understand that yes, we want to satisfy the client, but we also need to satisfy users. So and we're almost always going to find a solution that does both.

Stewart Gandolf
Okay. Now let's take a moment and talk about factors that will impact your estimate. And what we have found over time is that clients and there and we probably have found this yourself as well clients when they're asking about cost for websites often find a bewildering variety of scopes costs and so forth. And expectations oftentimes aren't in alignment with what is actually involved.

Stewart Gandolf
So today I thought I would share with you some of the things to consider when you're looking at the cost of your own website as you're thinking about getting a new one developed. So the first factor that matters is the size and complexity of your website. So large Web sites in particular can get pretty costly. Imagine if you have 2000 pages just for a team member to look at them and read them.

Stewart Gandolf
Quality proof that has substantial amounts of time, which of course time equals money. So the larger the site, the more complex the Web site is that you're starting with, the more expensive it will likely be to create a new one. Now, of course, if your site is bloated and we're not bringing everything over, sometimes the we can find ways of saving our budget by not bringing over pages that are worthless or redundant or whatever.

Stewart Gandolf
But just keep in mind that broadly speaking, in most cases the size of the site matters a lot. And so incidentally, there is an Apple, because what we're trying to do is help you make apples to apples comparisons as you're comparing quotes. And so these are some of the factors that matter because not every firm takes all of these things into account or may not scope them properly.

Stewart Gandolf
The choice of your content management system matters a lot as well. I particularly if you do proprietary or open source. So open source could be, for example, WordPress, which we use a lot. We also work with other platforms depending on the situation, depending on our client. One thing about a proprietary CMS that makes things a little more difficult for you is that a it just has to be more expensive to get the proprietary software in the first place.

Stewart Gandolf
And if you change your mind later, proprietary, it can be really difficult because they're closed systems. They oftentimes won't let you export work with a client like that right now where they're migrating away from dietary CMS and they won't let the client export anything. And it's very, very difficult and expensive to do. So Again, if you're in an enterprise site and a hospital system, you may need something really more complex.

Stewart Gandolf
If you're at a midsize or medium firm or smaller, WordPress can often work. It varies. Ask your vendor what the recommendation is and the next thing is can existing site graphics and copy be readily exported? I just mentioned that sometimes the CMS prevents it, but it really matters. And this can the graphics and the copy will be exported.

Stewart Gandolf
And again, it varies. We have to always check. So usually if it's WordPress we can do it. It depends if it's a different CMS. But however, sometimes the copy is worth exporting, which we'll talk about a little bit later, or the graphics we often see this might be really low resolution thumbnails that aren't adding a value anyway, so we may not want to export those.

Stewart Gandolf
But again, this is just one more factor for you to consider. Any special functionality requirements, for example, patient appointment setting, or if there is doctor finders or anything that's special for functionality, we'll add to cost. If you're using writes managed photos or a videographer who writes manage photos or videography, or if you're doing custom photography and videos that will obviously add cost rates, managed means that you're using a library.

Stewart Gandolf
You have to pay for usage and where there's an expiration date, that adds a lot to the complexity and cost. So a lot of the Getty Images banks, for example, are rights managed. So if you're going to go that route, you can get some photos that are not used as often, but it's going to be a pricey. Also, a lot of our clients prefer custom photos, custom videos, and that's great if you're willing and able to go through the expense of that, that could be excellent to the FCO planning and execution, as we'll see shortly.

Stewart Gandolf
A lot of times people aren't thinking about this here at all and that's really a problem. So that's going to impact the cost of FCO is in fact integrated into the website build. If there's additional website pages that are required and need to be written and designed, the amount and level of expert amount of copy as well as the level of expertise for the copy.

Stewart Gandolf
So a lot of firms will either just tell the client to write the copy or be, you know, get some low expense copy written overseas or use API or something. But if you're really serious about showing up in search engines and being an authority, typically you'll want to have higher level expert writers that know what they're doing and can thread the needle between being emotional, educational and writing appropriately for Google.

Stewart Gandolf
On search engine optimization, the experience of the people involved similarly. So obviously more experienced people tend to be more expensive in the world. Rushed timelines can add to expense rounds of revisions can certainly add to expense if it goes over a certain level of revisions, if you have any special security requirements for the website, if you want to add a user testing phase, sometimes complex sites may require an investment in a discovery process just to even come up with a realistic estimate.

Stewart Gandolf
We often see very complex sites and sometimes we can make a reasonable estimate based upon what we can see. But if it's going to require, you know, days of time and they require an investment just to do the due diligence. So it depends on the situation. We try not to do that, but sometimes that is the best choice number of pages that need to be custom designed.

Stewart Gandolf
So are you just going to have a single secondary page design, are going to have multiple designs, and do you need new or revised brand guidelines? So, for example, we're going to be talking about a little while a website redesign where we actually started by creating the brand, creating the brand guidelines, which makes the execution much better, so that of course there will separate level of expense over and above the website.

Stewart Gandolf
Should that be the direction you need to go. So now that you understand that there is a lot of factors that influence the price, the next thing is to figure out who's going to do it for you. Obviously, here we feel partial to our own agencies. So without being too self-promotional here, I can just tell you objectively, many times you may need to get quotes.

Stewart Gandolf
If you do, I would just recommend getting competent firms to give you quotes. That means that they've got people that specialize in these various areas like strategy, the account management, SEO, content design, senior developers, project management. You I would recommend there's no reason not to look for people with health care marketing experience. They understand how to motivate people to action very different than just creating a website.

Stewart Gandolf
Do you like the people you're working with? Do they have the track record and capabilities? And of course, does the budget make sense for both sides? So those are some things to think about. If you're interested. We have an e-book on this topic, How to Choose an agency that goes into depth pretty objectively. So feel free to request that from us.

Stewart Gandolf
So we're getting closer to making a decision on who we're going to hire. How what's how do we ensure success? Well, the first thing is to again, to carefully define your objectives, priorities and desired functionality. That's the first step. Second step is to build internal alignment around your objectives. Make sure they are on the same page, define a realistic budget, solicit bids from a shortlist, not a cattle call.

Stewart Gandolf
And that's really important. I know it may feel like it makes a lot of sense to ask 20 different agencies for quotes. Not only is that wasting your time, but you may find especially busier agencies may just passed. That actually happened to me just today. I wrote an email back to someone who had asked us to bid. They were looking for all kinds of spec work.

Stewart Gandolf
There's this huge RFP and they were talking to dozens of agencies and we're busy, we're successful, so we just politely passed so you can overdo that. So I understand the need to solicit bids, but I would keep it reasonable save your time and not waste other people's time as well. The identified the internal resources that will be involved, the internal people as well as assets, you know, employee time logs, contracts, pull that all together.

Stewart Gandolf
That can be hard sometimes to confirm the scope, timing and pricing with your agency. Make sure you're on the same page and you understand what you're getting upon commencement. I would highly recommend that you fully cooperate in the onboarding and process step steps and also consolidate feedback on each step and give the age so that provide that to the agency and give them clear direction.

Stewart Gandolf
Working together in this project is a team sport and it's imagined sort of throwing the ball back and forth to each other. I throw you the ball, you throw it back to me, I throw you the ball. It's going to be a lot more fun game of catch and you're going to be done a lot faster if we're all working together.

Stewart Gandolf
So, you know, clients often tell us they look at our agency as a member of their team. We certainly look at a client as a member of our team to work together to accomplish the goal of a fantastic website. This is a real world project timeline that we're creating. We just created actually for a complex site we're working with.

Stewart Gandolf
You'll see this particular one started in March, is going through August, about half the time period. There is development, there is this one has a couple of thousand pages, lots of peculiarities that require heavy duty, navigation, time and creativity. Are most of the sites we create, if they're custom or probably, you know, 90 days, 220 days, bit larger sites can take longer and obviously simpler sites may take less time site architecture.

Stewart Gandolf
So another this next phase that we're going to talk about is the site architecture. And this is often overlooked by people tragically. So the site architecture needs a flip through a couple of here. The site architecture is really all about our point of view, both SEO and usability. So the site architecture essentially is the foundational blueprint for your website.

Stewart Gandolf
And like I said, it determines both SEO and usability. But the CEO team needs to be involved at this very, very early stage because it impacts everything. So they should be making recommendations about your site map. Here you are all structure, you are all directs, redirects, your tags or content, other vital elements, and upon approval of that your SEO team should create both SEO and content mandatory on your web site.

Stewart Gandolf
The reason there is a convertible on this page is not a coincidence. The reason is because I have seen over and over again clients who unfortunately were never told otherwise will go ahead and pay someone to create a Web site. And they call us and say, Great, let's go ahead and do SEO now. And our response is, no, because it really should have been built into the new site.

Stewart Gandolf
And so just like if you decide you want to buy a Web site and that SEO matters to you, you should build that into it. It's much more efficient. Just like if you want a convertible, it's a whole lot smarter to buy a convertible than to buy a sedan and pay someone to soar the roof off and try to reconstruct a convertible.

Stewart Gandolf
It just doesn't make sense. And there's all kinds of problems that come with not thinking about SEO upfront, and I'll talk about that more in a little while. So we've got we've done the planning, we've got our architecture. Now it's time to think about our content planning and execution. So you know, more specifically about the content audit, we oftentimes will our content team will give very specific details about, okay, taking the information architecture to Mars, precisely which pages are we going to carry over, which ones do you recommend that you kill or redirect?

Stewart Gandolf
Which missing pages do you have compared to your competitors? Where are the big SEO opportunities in which pages would benefit from a refresh? This is all pre launch and oftentimes the content plan may include things we'll do after launch, right? If we have to do a lot of content, sometimes the pressure to get live is big, so we'll create the website, get it up and create already be planning the next generation of copy.

Stewart Gandolf
One thing that I would say that with due respect, my colleague brought on the other side here that while design is essential and everybody can see it, copy is equally essential. So while everybody can think about whether a website is pretty, very few people give enough credence to the power of copy. And just remember that copy motivates people to action.

Stewart Gandolf
It's essential for high ranking SEO that advances your brand messaging. It's got to be accurate and clinically correct and again, it typically requires someone who knows SEO, emotional motivating, copy and factual. So copy is a vital part and oftentimes it's going back to our saying earlier, we have apples to oranges quotes, you know, where a web designer says, well, you just write your copy.

Stewart Gandolf
You can you'll save some money. That really is not optimal. It's better to have an expert who really knows what they're doing so they can write for Google, Right. For humans. Right. We're referring doctors or whatever. Okay. So why don't we get to the stage? Also, we spend a lot of time thinking about brand guidelines and messaging quality to make sure we're consistent with the brand that we're writing for.

Stewart Gandolf
We also make sure we audit all the high priority pages to make sure they meet both those brand and set of standards. Make sure you don't migrate bad content over or bring on technical debt. In other words, sometimes people bring over a website, they unknowingly bring over bad code, which means that a problem has been existing for years, continues on into the future indefinitely.

Stewart Gandolf
So we don't want to do that. We want to clean all that up, offering to do a website, Let's do it right. And again, we're thinking about all the things that matter with copy, like the target audiences, accuracy, credibility, readability, you know, grammar format, all these things. Incidentally, we have a new webinar coming up in a few weeks about content marketing.

Stewart Gandolf
Want to go into much more detail about this topic, so you're welcome to attend that. Stay tuned. I'll be available. If you're watching the recording, this may already be on the site. We have a content marketing webinar that is a sister to this particular meeting. Okay, next section is design. Brett, take it away.

Brett Maurer
I think it's important to note that when I speak about design of a website, I'm not speaking about just me, the creative director and my team who does the design. A lot more people are involved in design that goes from project management to account managers. In our case, we're lucky to have a lot of experts that can help along the way.

Brett Maurer
Our SEO teams are fabulous. All of those things inform that phase for when we take over. Stewart referred to it as sexy. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. We like to think it is, but it's definitely always informed design. It's not. It's not a designer saying, Hey, this looks cool, let's do this. It is. It needs to respond to specific demographics.

Brett Maurer
Target audience. As you know, conversions is always the most important. So we're going to start right here. This is kind of what I was just talking about. Design is not a monolith, and by that I mean we don't stand alone. Design doesn't just happen. It's informed by a lot of teams, it's informed by SEO work. It's informed by project management, site maps, client input and needs.

Brett Maurer
That all happens before we ever touch any design, no matter how good we make a design, a website design. Look, it's not going to matter if all of those things are not in place, right? If we're just designing off the cuff, it's going to be cool looking, but it's probably not going to function, is probably not going to achieve what you're hoping it achieves.

Brett Maurer
So here you see a quick list client inputs it needs. What are you looking for? What's your goal? Are we looking for more conversions? The answer is yes. You're always looking for that. You know, like Stewart, Stewart has started talking about auditing your existing website. What pages are necessary, What pages are useless? How can we how can we really clarify what needs to be on this site and what is excessive site maps always important.

Brett Maurer
Again, that's which pages are going to be there? What are your secondary pages? What are your primary pages? What pages? Give you more detail if the user wants that, a lot of times they don't. But in health care, it's always great to have that as well. Wireframes. This is a quick visual of wireframes you're looking at now. This isn't a design and our firm, again, we have a lot of people have been doing this for years.

Brett Maurer
Our everyone from our SEO team through project management, through account management, is more than capable of understanding how to put together a wireframe that helps us achieve a really clear design that gives the most important content to your user as soon as possible. Of course, then you know, we make sure the client is aligned on that and we develop a client brief, which then informs what we do in design UI and UX.

Brett Maurer
This term gets thrown around a lot and I think there's some confusion on it depending on your level of familiarity with with design and with websites, it's not a single thing. They're two very different things and a lot of big product software teams have UI designers and UX designers working in tandem. It's really important to understand the difference.

Brett Maurer
The user interface is more about how your site looks, how do you call to actions? Look, how do your buttons work, how are photos treated? How do, how do people understand what they're seeing? The user experience, which is much more important, especially when you're talking about brand, how that translates through your communication and how you have someone convert into contacting you.

Brett Maurer
The user interface is visual. The user experience is how easy is it to get from point A the introduction to your site to point B or Z. However, however many steps you have along the way, ideally it's not many to contacting to making an appointment to engaging with your site or your company in the way you want it to.

Brett Maurer
User experience is really important. It conveys what type of company you are, how you're approaching your deliverable, and how easily accessible your offerings are to potential patients, potential users, all that. Yeah, this is a this is a quick chart. I think these this is a really nice, useful way to understand the differences, the principles of your user interface.

Brett Maurer
It should be intuitive. There shouldn't be that many surprises. People should understand that if they click the contact US button their contact in here, if there's a form and they fill it out, it's being sent. If there's a read more button, they understand that that's going to give them more information on the topic. They're looking at. Consistency and clarity are vital to user interface.

Brett Maurer
Designers are ambitious. I'll talk about that in a minute. We like to create new things, but intuitiveness is really important and there are a lot of learned behaviors. We've all had 20 or 30 years of understanding of websites this point, so that becomes very important. Again, user experience and experience is a much longer list. It's a much more subjective list.

Brett Maurer
But again, it's making sure the client can digest your information easily. It's making sure that they understand once they find that information they're looking for, they can act on it, they can contact you, they can learn more context. That's everything. Usability is first user experience includes understanding how to navigate through your site, or do you have clear breadcrumbs where they can get back a page if they need to?

Brett Maurer
The simplest thing to the more complex things like compliance that makes sure that your website is easily viewable by people who may be visually impaired. You know, high contrast design takes a backseat to accessibility on websites. It needs to it's a good it's a good practice. So that's a whole webinar in itself, UI versus UX. But we're going to move on to the basics of what make websites great at all.

Brett Maurer
These things apply to what I just went through, and this is one of the most important things I've learned through years of product design and website design. You don't need to reinvent the wheel to have a successful website. Again, designers earn vicious things We love to explore. We love to create novel solutions, but we do have 20 to 30 years of website design to look back on, to rely on, to reference.

Brett Maurer
There are best practices that have been proven to convert better. You don't need to recreate how a navigation works. If a navigation works a lot of our users have learned experiences. They understand that if they roll over in navigation and it drops down, you're going to get more options. They understand that if they click a learn more button, there's going to be more information there.

Brett Maurer
So I think a lot of times designers make a mistake of trying to be too novel rather than relying on best practices. And we see that a lot. And we we pull back a lot of novel, cool solutions many times when we redesign a site because it's not as effective as what we all have learned through the years and we all understand to work, there are common throughout site design.

Brett Maurer
There are a lot of different types of users we have. This is a quick little list we put together, but again, your site needs to be intuitive and flexible to accommodate different types of users. You have people like that avid searcher who will, as soon as they get to your site, they'll look for the search bar, they'll search with what they want.

Brett Maurer
They'll find that content. You have people that just scroll down the page and look at the titles and see what's relevant to them. And you have people that go through a website based on navigation and clicking as they see things that are relevant. And of course you have the users who may have more difficulty seeing or understand in the site, and that's what the ADA compliance really comes in handy in an ideal great website, which we're talking about today.

Brett Maurer
Your website should be able to accommodate all of these people. If if you have an avid searcher, you have a search bar up top. If you have a scroller, as you scroll down the page, the section headlines reading like a clear narrative, you're not it's not disjointed, everything's connected. And it tells a story that goes from the homepage the about us page to a very deep site page that has details.

Brett Maurer
There's there's no reason you can't accommodate for every type of user as you design this slide I always debate on even including it responsive design. It's an automatic that is kind of a play on words right. And I say I debate on whether or not to include it because at this point it is an industry standard. Your site needs to operate and look great and read well and be digestible.

Brett Maurer
Sure, on desktop. But as you see from the start, at the bottom of the slide, almost 60% of people are only interacting with your websites based on the mobile. That's an ever growing number. It's very important. I saw a Q&A that came up earlier asking if a majority of your users are still interacting by desktop. Is that due to a lack of good mobile design or is that indicative of your demographic?

Brett Maurer
I would say it could be either. Your demographic definitely matters, right? I mean, if you're if you're main demographic, your target audience is much order. You may only you may be seeing an uptick in desktop views more and more. As a designer, I love desktop and how it looks, but I look at a lot of websites on my phone and very seldom do I see them on desktop.

Brett Maurer
So I think the best answer to that is why not have both your desktop and your mobile solutions look perfect, be well thought out and function well? The answer here based on responsive is always a nice balance. You always accommodate both. I think the answer to responsive design is necessary. Now. This is not an option anymore. You can't rely on desktop design that looks good, that fails on mobile.

Brett Maurer
It impacts how you write your contact content. It impacts how you chunk up your content as well. It needs to be digestible on mobile. It needs to function well on mobile. It's just not an option anymore, which makes my job a lot more fun. Of course. The importance of hierarchy. This is a really traditional design principle, definitely when you're dealing with typography, but this applies to all of your content down your web page, especially your home page throughout your website.

Brett Maurer
You need to understand how people digest that information. This is a really helpful graphic on the left. Specific to typography, hierarchy matters. What are people reading first? What are they reading second, and what is tertiary? So as you think through how you build your site, as you think through how you layout your content, you need to understand what people are seeing first, what thing is taking the primary focus in each section of your website or each page of your website?

Brett Maurer
This is very relevant with typography when you're dealing with SEO, this is super relevant when you're talking about user experience. How people navigate a site, you know is something is very important. Should it be in a carousel? Should you have very fast carousels with a lot of information? Maybe not if it's that important and you need to make these decisions all along the way.

Brett Maurer
And again, this is a time where best practices that we've learned through the years come in handy. I just mentioned this understanding that there is a short attention span on websites. You need to have your content in laid out and interpreted in a very digestible way. You can't have typography spanning the full width of the page. That's not how that works for most people.

Brett Maurer
They can't read across that long thing or they'll lose interest. You don't want to have huge sections of content, especially on our homepage. Here you see one of our recent cardiovascular clients. You'll you'll see we have a lot of the core content We, you know, above the forward is a thing that comes and goes depending on who you're talking to.

Brett Maurer
But the very important things are at the top of the page that will always be relevant, that will always be important. Can they contact you? Yes. Then they navigate your site? Yes. Do they get the idea of what your offering is? Absolutely. In this case, we have quit links below the Hero banner. But when you see why choose us that that big blue dark section, that could easily be a very copy heavy situation.

Brett Maurer
That could be an unappealing content section. But we've learned through best practices that you need to tease them into the content, let them understand what they want to see. If they want to click that, they click it, they learn more information on their right. You see a secondary page. Again, you're making the content more digestible. You're making the user able to find what they're looking for quicker and a more efficient way is very important.

Brett Maurer
It's very important, especially when you get away from your home page and your secondary pages, your detail pages. You see just huge blocks of copy. And even if you maintain an all copy page, you need to apply typographic principles that lets that copy be digestible, clear section and clear headed. Again, that hierarchy that just lets the person understand exactly what they're reading and look for the information they need.

Brett Maurer
Content variety. It's a way to maintain visual interest. I would love to say that this is very much about only designers, but it's not. This. Again, this involves a lot of work on the client side and on our site. More and more our websites can be easily multimedia. Should everything be a photo with a block of copy? Should you have a big quote for your testimonials?

Brett Maurer
I'm no testimony fills are pretty valuable. They go back to what Stewart was talking about earlier, that accreditation you want to be able to relate to people. You want to understand how they've experienced your offering. They don't always have to be type in this case, another one of our clients synergetic. So testosterone replacement and hormone therapy, a company which we've worked with a lot.

Brett Maurer
This was a new website design that we did for them and we started mixing in more multimedia. As you see the patient stories, it's not just a testimonial quote, it's a video of one of their patients saying what changes they made in hips lifestyle, what changes the therapy it helped him to accomplish. Seeing someone talking about something, someone you can relate to, someone who's gone through is a really nice way to mix up your content.

Brett Maurer
Can you have quotes from clients? Absolutely. Does it keep the user scrolling down your page? If you have a mixture of quotes, a mixture of photos, videos, icons, special video treatments, it does. And on your homepage it can make a big difference. So there's just not that much reason anymore not to keep the page engaging even after you get past this very important top of page element, relatable design.

Brett Maurer
This is really important. This this goes to ADA compliance and the people see your site. Can they understand excuse me, can they understand your site? But more importantly, what we're talking about here is understanding your audience, understanding your target demographics, no matter how pretty your site is, if you're speaking to the wrong people with your design, you're going to you're going to lose lose users.

Brett Maurer
They're going to check out if, for instance, your audience, your your offering is male specific processes. For instance, I don't think you want to show a lot of a lot of women. It's just not relatable. What is your demographic? What area are you serving? Is it lower income? Is it higher income? Are you catering to do Medicaid or premium insurances?

Brett Maurer
Let the user know that right away so that they can understand or relate better Expertise is very important. You know, if we have a client now, if you're trying to design a site for ophthalmologists and all of your images are optometrists, you're going to have a really quick disconnect there. You're going to have a checkout. People won't view you as an authority if you if health care is dangerous in this regard, if you don't understand their procedures, especially when you're showing them or speaking to them, you lose a lot of credibility and people will find someone who they trust more or that understands your industry or vertical better.

Brett Maurer
And then at the end of the day, I love interactive, I love website work, but brand always matters to me. I'm a brander at heart. I think we all like to think that we are. And the beautiful thing about websites is it is your steward mentioned it earlier, it's the front door of your brand. You know, a lot of times when we're working with clients, especially on brand, when we think about social media and advertising on social media, we're trying to stand out, we're trying to differentiate on those very crowded fields.

Brett Maurer
When you have a user on your website, you have a contained audience, you have an opportunity to establish your own brand environment, communicate your mission, your values, your purpose, really differentiate yourself, and let that customer know that that you are special, you are unique, and they are in your world right now. This is a great website we just finished.

Brett Maurer
We also did the branding for this company. It's a blood plasma donation thing. Sorry, I practice if you will, but here you see, we're exercising all the same principles we do for a less specific look inside. But in this case, we're really letting that website scream its brand. What's it target demographic? College kids who maybe could use some money for donations.

Brett Maurer
You know what? What is the feeling of this company is optimistic. It's positive. You're making a change in society by giving your blood, really establishing, again, the brand environment. There's no reason your website cannot promote your brand while also being very effective in terms of how people interact with it and how they see you, your company and how expert or yeah, I mean that's how expert you are in your field.

Brett Maurer
So I always, I always suggest that you find a really happy balance between pure functionality, what works, what doesn't best practices. And there's absolutely no reason you can't have a very unique website that speaks to your brand, your mission, and also have a great website that deals with health care. It doesn't always have to be bland, it doesn't always have to be careful and boring, but it does need to be functional.

Stewart Gandolf
Thank you, Brett. That was great. So now let's talk about development and launch. So there's a whole bunch of work that goes on behind the scenes with development, and I'm not going to try to explain all these individual steps to which I'm sure would bore you and maybe even bore me. So there's a lot of details that happen behind the scenes.

Stewart Gandolf
About half the work typically is happening at this stage. It varies, of course, by the project, but this is where a lot of the real work happens. When we're working with clients. Typically we'll put together a website that they'll see maybe 2 to 4 weeks before launch. But until we get from that last phase to this phase, there's a whole bunch of work that happens behind the scenes.

Stewart Gandolf
Couple bonus tips today. As you may or may not know, there's been some recent changes with the Office of Civil Rights. The FTC has gotten involved in class action lawsuits around privacy specifically related to digital tracking technologies. We've had webinars on this. We also just created an e-book. If you're interested in this topic, please check our site. We have lots of resources available on our website.

Stewart Gandolf
This is a vital issue. Please take seriously to make sure that you're doing the right steps to make sure your site is compliant and you're not inadvertently doing things that are out of compliance. So, for example, surprisingly as as of this moment, the Google Analytics is not allowed. Everybody uses Google Analytics, the entire industry does. But Google Analytics is a example of a digital tracking technology.

Stewart Gandolf
And the Office of Civil Rights has come out multiple times against digital tracking technologies. So again, as much more detail available on our Web site about this and you can check that out. Similarly, there is also a whole bunch of lawsuits have been filed over the years over ADA compliance and websites. This particular slide talks about user way, which is a vendor we often recommend as a insurance policy.

Stewart Gandolf
They have a tool that makes what any website user friendly from an ADA standpoint. And so again, we have information on our website about this. Feel free to read the blog post on this and if you have questions you're going to ask us. But both help and ADA compliance are essential and make sure that you are thinking about this as part of your website.

Stewart Gandolf
Launch. Okay, So common mistakes to avoid. So I, I feel like people seem to learn from mistakes more than the positive stuff. And certainly we've seen our share of mistakes. So one of the big mistakes we hear all the time and this one is among the most regrettable people call us up and say, Stewart, we finally finished our Web site.

Stewart Gandolf
Now we can finally begin marketing. And again, my answer was like, No, why did you do that? Because as the epicenter of your marketing, it's really important to be thinking about marketing your website before you began. So if you've made that mistake, we understand we can still work with you. But it really this is an integral part of your marketing.

Stewart Gandolf
It's much more ideal to plan your marketing around the website and build the website from day one with marketing in mind. Number two, this is incredibly common. We see clients come to us after they had a new website done, their website doe nosed over from traffic and went from, you know, high to nothing overnight. And now they're panicking, as they probably should.

Stewart Gandolf
It's really bad. We have a client we're working with from New Zealand that had literally that happened last year where the firm they are working with is more of a tech firm. They didn't understand our SEO. They relaunched their years and years of international SEO dropped to through the floor. We were able to get most they called us, we brought our SWAT team on it.

Stewart Gandolf
We were able to get most of that traffic back, but that's high risk and it certainly isn't ideal. It's a very high risk maneuver. Do not do it. Make sure SEO is integrated into your new website. Mistakes, you know, can be very costly. There's no guarantees and you may not get all that traffic back. So be careful underestimating the value of content.

Stewart Gandolf
Like I said, many people say I'll just have the website designer design the content. I use a template and I'll write it. And you really are sure selling yourself short if you do that, especially if marketing is going to be at all an issue of importance for your business. Duplicate clients, sometimes unknowingly or even knowingly take content from other websites.

Stewart Gandolf
Google books, that is plagiarism. That's not good for your search engine rankings. So whether or not that's a ranking factor is up for debate. But there's also laws around this. So please don't plagiarize or to strip content from other websites. That is a real problem. That's SEO wise and potentially legally delegating websites to I.T. Hopefully by now have convinced you this is not I.T. job.

Stewart Gandolf
This is a larger multi-faceted team sport. So just simply by getting a website type is a high risk endeavor. Looking at your website only is an expense. Of course it can be a revenue generator for you not understanding a clearly defined of work or, you know, hiring, you know, sort of unqualified, cheapest vendors you can find is can be a real issue, especially if you're in a competitive industry where you care.

Stewart Gandolf
So I would suggest that if you're interested in this topic and you have questions, reach out to us if you are interested our services and want to give us a call, we're happy to do an exploratory call with you. And if appropriate, we can even give you a website critique on what's working, what's not working with your site from a creative standpoint as well as from an FCO standpoint.

Stewart Gandolf
And from that point, if it's appropriate, we're happy to provide an estimate as well. So I invite you to reach out to us. The also, if you have any other questions or available to talk to you. And I want to say thank you very much for attending our webinar. We appreciate your time. We hope you got a lot of value out of this.

Stewart Gandolf
Thanks so much.