Whilst the number changes every minute, it is currently estimated that there are over 640 million websites in the world today. It seems everyone and everything has its own web presence. Of course, some sites are more successful than others, with some driving sales or requests for information forward for a business, while other sites actually turn potential customers off; leaving them irritated by what is, in effect, a poorly designed site.<\/p>\n
Irrespective of the business, whether a dentist or a dress makers, the principles of good website design<\/a> remain the same.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A good website is built on a strong design that catches the eye and fresh content. On the web, content is king so keeping a website refreshed with new information and news is essential to ensuring visitors return. Fresh content is also key to search engine optimisation or SEO as it is known. Using their knowledge of search engines, SEO experts, like those in the in-house team at Dental Media, work to achieve a first page ranking for your site. Their technical skill can significantly help boost traffic and ultimately drive your business forward.<\/p>\n Also essential when building a new website is navigation and usability. Complying to the disability act is of course key, as is ensuring the site is easy to move around and use. A site with lots of information and products on that is impossible to navigate is useless and will see visitors leaving very quickly. You can see this effect if you use Google Analytics to monitor traffic on your website – simply look for the “bounce” rate statistics and you will get a very clear picture of what is happening. Although it’s industry and site dependent, a bounce rate much above 50% is not good.<\/p>\n While the principles of design are the same for every site, within particular sectors it is helpful to have an understanding of the industry. One such industry is dentistry; when designing a website for this sector it is important to understand what is important to dental clients and the kind of information they require. The way a website within this sector is presented is also key; the site must be inviting while remaining professional and informative. You will often see dentists websites that have been built by non-dental design agencies that are strewn with factual inaccuracies. Here at Dental Media we undertake marketing for hundreds of dentists across the UK and we know that many of them are too busy to check every piece of web or blog copy in detail – consequently they trust us to make sure that everything that is published, whether on the web or in print, is factually correct, interesting, risk-free and compliant with legislation from the likes of the GDC and ICO.<\/p>\n It is also important to identify and implement the latest best-practice in website design in order to help your clients keep one step ahead of the competition. A good example of this is “responsive” web design which ensures that the site displays optimally on all devices without the need for a separate mobile or tablet development. This also helps the client to keep good control of ongoing maintenance costs.<\/p>\n