Content Suggestions
Starting up a new medical or dental practice website can seem pretty daunting – but it really doesn’t have to be at all.
After all, there are thousands of examples out there to follow, although they’re not always good examples...
And what pages and features do you need? How much is too much? Luckily, we’ve been building healthcare websites since the turn of the century (sounds impressive? ...it’s just since 2000) and are happy to present our thoughts on what should be included on every medical and dental website, along with tips on things to consider for every type of specialty practice.
Which Pages Do You Really Need?
At a minimum, every site should include the following pages and content:
Which Additional Pages Will Add Value?
There are many supplemental pages that can be quite valuable to your patients and staff:
Domain Usage Definitions
What does all this mean? – hits and visits and sites and pages...
Hits represent the total number of requests made to your site during the given time period. Hits were once an often-used statistic, but are really misleading. Visits tells you a lot more about your site’s performance.
Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browser's cache.
Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).
Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to your site. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many IP addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gauge as to the number of visitors to your site.
Visits occur when some user makes a request for a page on your site for the first time. As long as the same user keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the user makes a request to your site, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, users who link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips).
A Site is a remote user that makes requests to your site, and is based on the remote user's IP Address/Hostname.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your site, that is accessable to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your site. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.
User Agents is a fancy name for browsers. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind however, that many browsers allow the user to change its reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
Entry/Exit Pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was is counted as an Exit page.
Responsive Design Medical and Dental Websites
Websites that look great and work right – all the time
There’s recently been a fundamental shift in how your viewers look at your website. It used to be OK to design a website to look perfect on a large desktop computer screen. If someone wanted to see your site on a smart phone, well, they just had to horizontal scroll a lot. Well, people are through scrolling...
In 2010, smart phone sales moved past those of desktop and laptop computers, and in 2015 Google announced that they received more than half of search requests from mobile devices. If your practice website is not fully responsive, you’re risking losing your future internet audience – if they haven’t already left.
You can have the most comprehensive website with the best SEO features and great search engine page rank, but if someone finds your site on their mobile device and sees that they’re going to have to work very hard to make much sense of it, they’ll probably just keep on searching.
And Google has recently announced that they’re giving responsive websites top priority to searchers using a mobile device.
Why does it matter?
How our website would look when opened on an iPhone if it wasn’t responsive.
Substantial screen magnification and then horizontal scrolling is required for a meaningful view. It’s pretty easy to lose track of where you are at that point. Even easier to just click off and go somewhere else.
How our site looks now as a Responsive site.
Every text block, link, image and menu remains fully legible.
Try it on your phone!
How does it work?
Our Responsive Design Healthcare Websites are part of our Content Management System, with a much more complex underlying structure. The system can tell what size device a viewer is using, and resizes every element of the site to fit into the viewer’s window (or move it to the next line, if necessary). This ensures that all of your text and images remain totally legible no matter what size device they’re being viewed on.
Is your website responsive?
If it’s not, you need to consider an upgrade to a Highland Group Healthcare Website very soon. Just think about all those people trying to view your site on a mobile device right now...
CMS User Procedure
Welcome to the world of Content Management!
Our CMS allows you to add, delete or edit content on existing pages of your site using a very friendly editor.
We'll explore all the features in the sections below. And rest assured, you can always have us make site updates if you don't have time or just don't feel comfortable with certain areas.
Logging In
If you elect to have website access granted to anyone in your practice, we'll create a user account for that person. The user will then receive an a-mail from the system giving them their username and password – which we can change or turn off at your request.
We'll add a link to your Home Page titled "Staff Log-in" (or anything else you'd prefer). Once the link is clicked, you'll be taken to the log-in page >
Options are available here to assist users who have forgotten their username or password, if desired.
Once you've successfully logged-in, you'll be taken to the site's home page and can begin editing.
Using the Editor
After log-in, go to the page you want to edit. You’ll see the Edit icon 
at the top right corner of every article on every page.
Clicking on this icon and then the Edit link will open up the editing view for that article (we’re using this page as an example):
Editing Text
You may add, delete or change any text on the page. Once you’ve completed the desired text changes, click the Save button at the bottom left corner of the Editor section and your changes will be saved (click Cancel if you wish to return to the original page). You can then see the updated page – click the Edit icon again if you wish to make additional changes.
Most of the functions in the Editor are very similar to those found in any typical text editor. We’ll take a look at some of the functions you may not be familiar with (a complete description of each function can be found here):
Fonts
are determined by the template and website structure - please do not change
Font Size
is determined by the template and website structure - please do not change
Font Styles
are determined by the template and website structure - please do not change
Format Styles
are where you can indicate headlines and subheads. Select the desired line of text and use Heading 2 for the major headline, Heading 3 for subheads and so on. The entire line needs to be selected, not just certain words or phrases in a line.
Cut, Copy, Paste
are standard buttons, with the addition of the Paste as Plain Text option. Whenever you want to paste text into an article, select this option first, paste the text there and then Insert. You’ll avoid many formatting issues caused by imported tags.
Bulleted and Numbered Lists
can be applied to full lines of text. Use the Indent
function to increase the indent level on selected lines
Insert/Edit Image
is where you can add images to your article. Please see Adding Images for details.
Insert/Edit Link
creates hyperlinks from selected text. Please see Creating Links for details.
Spellcheck
will check the spelling on the article text when clicked.
Adding Images
When preparing an image to add to the page, there are a few things to consider:
- The image should be the final size that it will be on the page. Do not scale the image up or down after it’s been placed.
- The image must be in a “saved for web” format, either in .jpg .gif or .png format, with a file size no larger than 100k.
- Images that are not yours (obtained from other sources) must not be under copyright. If they are, you must have permission and must add a note attributing the image to the copyright holder.
- When you’re through preparing the image file, save it to an appropriate location on your computer.
To place the image on your page, click on the location you’d like it to appear (before the first word in a text block if you want the image to be placed within the text block, or on a blank line of its own if you want it to stand alone).
Then click on the Insert/Edit Image button. You’ll see the Image Manager appear:
If the image you want to place is already in the website files, you can click on the appropriate folder in the center window, click on the desired image and then click Insert.
If the image is still on your computer and yet to be brought into the site, all you’ll need to do is click on the folder (shown in the center window) that you want to place the image into – or click on the New Folder button if necessary – and then click on the Upload button, You’ll see the Upload window open:
Drag and drop the desired file onto the Drop files here window.
You won’t need to adjust any of the image options here – you can fine-tune the resizing of the image in the next step.
Click the Upload button to finish.
All that’s left is to place the image where you want it. If the image is intended to stand on its own, it will appear right in the position on the page that you clicked earlier and you’re all through here (you can select Centre in the Alignment dropdown to center it in the page).
If you want to have text run around the image, as long as you previously placed your cursor at the beginning of the desired text block, all you need to do is select Right or Left in the Alignment dropdown and then de-select the Equalize checkbox in the Margin area and enter '10' in the opposite Margin field (Left or Right) from what you selected in Alignment above. This places a margin that holds away the text from the edge of the image.
You can make fine adjustments to the size of the image here – overtype the value in either of the Dimensions fields (the other will change automatically). Once you’ve clicked the Insert button at the bottom right you’ll be able to see the results immediately.
To delete an image that’s already been placed, just select the image and click the Delete key on your keyboard.
Creating Links
Adding a hyperlink to a selection of text or to an image is fairly straightforward. Drag your cursor across the desired text or click on the desired image to select it. The click on the Insert/Edit Link buttonin the toolbar. The Advanced Link frame will open:
To create a link to an external web page (not part of your website), just place your cursor into the address field of your browser when the desired page is displayed. Copy the entire web address (including the http://) and paste it into the URL field at the top of the Advanced Link frame. If you wish the linked page to open in a new window (keeping your website open in the background), select Open in new window in the Target dropdown. Click on the Insert button at the bottom left and the link will be created.
To create a link to an internal web page, click on the Menu item in the Link Browser frame. Navigate to the desired menu and then click on the page within that menu that you want to link to. Click on the Insert button at the bottom left and the link will be created.