Commissioning a Turnkey Dental Website

I build websites for dental clinics from the very same ready-made project, and yet they turn out at noticeably different levels of quality. Let's talk about how to get the very most out of commissioning a website for your practice.

To achieve the best possible result, let's work out exactly what materials the clinic can prepare in advance for the future website.

Here's what you can prepare, and whoever you eventually turn to for website development, these photographs will play a genuinely important — sometimes decisive — role in the final design.

At the very start of my career, when the pages had little other content to draw on, photography really was the key factor. These days, building websites from ready-made projects, photography's importance has faded slightly, simply because the pages I offer are already full of other engaging content. Even so, showing off your dentists and your clinic still matters, so every time we begin a conversation about building a website, I send the client a link to an article on how to photograph a clinic properly. Have a skim through it, and if the photos on your current site are looking dated, the simplest and most effective fix is to set aside a single day, invite friends of different ages with attractive smiles to play the part of patients, and run a proper photoshoot. New photography can transform how people perceive even an old, tired website.

Clinical experience, and the examples that demonstrate it. I keep returning to a simple point: every visitor to a dental website is really only searching for the answer to two questions. How good are you at your job, and can I afford you?

This particular point rests largely on you, but naturally, seeing that most clients arrive without any before-and-after examples of their own, I've solved the problem by sourcing beautiful stock cases from Shutterstock instead. Every one of my projects now features striking, demonstrative clinical cases, professionally shot.

Commissioning a new website tends to motivate the client to introduce a proper photo protocol at their own clinic, so they can eventually replace these stock cases with real ones. It usually takes about a year to establish and grow accustomed to a consistent dental photo protocol, and to have a set of completed cases to show for it. Roughly a year on, my clients start sending me their own work, and I'm always glad to publish it on the site.

The logo, and the clinic's colours. Almost everyone has a logo of some kind, but its design can easily fall behind the times. It's a common enough scenario: a client sends over their logo and admits, a little sadly, that it's years old and looking dated now. Ten years ago, it was knocked together in a hurry — sketched out, more or less, on the back of an envelope — and now it's plain to see the logo will stand out for all the wrong reasons on a smart new website. In cases like this, I work up several new logo options for the client entirely free of charge, and I honestly can't recall a single instance where the offer was turned down. I'll write a separate article one day on how to design a dental logo quickly and easily, but for now, let's simply note the point.

A beautiful logo elevates the whole site. It's worked not only into the header, but also used as a divider throughout the pages. Its design needs to match the calibre of the site around it — get that right, and it contributes real style and beauty to the finished website.

By and large, that's everything — but let me add the icing on the cake. There's one thing that's become especially relevant right now, and that's video on the website. I've written a separate article on what I consider the single most important feature on a dental website today, and that article is devoted entirely to video. People don't really read any more; they want to watch. If you meet your patients halfway and start communicating through video — recording answers to common questions, showing the clinic, sharing video testimonials from happy patients — you'll be doing what ninety-five per cent of your competitors aren't, and patients will genuinely appreciate it. They come to your site looking for information, for answers to the questions weighing on them: how to choose a good dentist among so many options, and how to find the clinic offering the best value for their money. Talk about your work honestly and openly, in a video format that's convenient for the viewer, and you don't need to be a marketing genius to see it will bring enquiries from patients who are already halfway to trusting you.

Producing video takes time, and while you're choosing a developer for your future dental website, you're unlikely to have any video material ready to publish yet. Even so, it's important to plan for video integration when commissioning your website. Make sure there's the option for video to autoplay where appropriate, rather than only playing on click. I've set out three different approaches to placing video on a website in more detail in a separate article, with examples and explanations of how each is used. Do read it — these really are three distinct scenarios, and all three matter.

And, of course, I'll remind you that I've already created ready-made websites for dental clinics that will exceed even your boldest expectations — and choosing one lets you cut costs and get an excellent result quickly, saving both time and money.

I've previously published an article on the top five mistakes when commissioning a website for a dental clinic. It covers several further points worth considering — do read it, to get the very most out of your future website.