Why do dental clinic websites fail?

Among dentists, you often hear that websites simply don't work, that they don't bring in new patients.

Let's pause and think about that for a moment.

When you hand out leaflets and don't get the response you hoped for, you don't blame the paper, do you? You understand perfectly well that what's written matters far more than the medium it's printed on. A lack of the expected response comes down to poor content, never the medium the advertisement happens to sit on.

Coming back to websites, the same logic is odd to ignore, because you can always think of a couple of clinics whose patients come precisely because of their website. Take, for example, the website of Smile at Once, a clinic you'll certainly know. Once you've finished reading this article, go and take a look — I'm confident you'll spot plenty of details that clearly show the website is working. We'll discuss this now, not with reference to that particular clinic, but in general terms, so you can note the important principles that make any website genuinely work.

A photo against a plain white wall, in a white coat, is the very first thing that always greets you on a poor website. A photo taken without any effort or imagination — you know it when you see it, and so does every visitor to your site; they can tell instantly it was taken carelessly.

The first thing we do for clients is provide detailed guidance on how to run a proper photoshoot. This guide is now freely available to everyone. Read through the detailed description, complete with examples of how to shoot portraits, patient appointments, and the clinic's interiors.

We provide detailed recommendations on positioning the dentist within the frame, the correct camera settings, the lighting, along with examples of precisely what the finished result should look like. These recommendations help both the clinic owner and whoever's holding the camera achieve a genuinely good outcome. Below, you can see a series of photographs. They were all shot to the same guide, so you may notice a certain family resemblance between them.

There are really only two ways to source icons. The first is to copy them from someone else's website. The second is to have your own made. I think you understand the difference in approach well enough. My clients' websites are already on the third generation of unique icons, created by my own designer.

We now have a library of well over 150 different icons, capable of representing every aspect of dentistry — cost, treatment, results, guarantees, and much else besides. Whatever the subject, we can find or create an icon for it. The essential thing to understand here is that building a website properly is a great deal of work, made up of countless small details that, together, shape the overall impression of the finished result.

You'll typically see the same handful of images turning up again and again on medical websites, simply because developers save themselves time by pulling images straight from a search engine. Many can't even be bothered to visit the manufacturer's own website and download the proper high-resolution image. It's worth understanding that building a website carries a real cost in time, and sourcing images is very much part of that. Naturally, plenty of developers try to cut that time short, grabbing the first image that comes up in search results — images that are already everywhere, and often of disappointingly low quality.

Another important point: everyone values their own time. Show someone a wall of long text, and they simply won't want to read it — and asking a patient to invest their time in reading material whose value isn't immediately obvious is, frankly, a little disrespectful of them. So what do we actually do about this?

Yes, we still use text, but it's short and to the point, well illustrated, and posted only in the dentist's own voice, always working towards specific goals:

• relieving the patient of any sense of guilt about the state of their teeth;
• building confidence in the quality of the service, and communicating the specialists' real experience;
• promising a caring attitude, and a genuinely thorough approach to solving the patient's problem.

Now let's turn to describing the treatment process itself. Here we can pick out four key features and present them on the site with four headings and icons. Minimal text, showing exactly where your practice's own emphasis lies. In general dentistry, for instance, the important points might be quality anaesthesia, reliable modern materials, visual control using optics, and a thorough final polish.

In prosthetics, it's worth emphasising quality preparation, preservation of natural tooth tissue, aesthetics, strength, and maintaining healthy TMJ function. For every treatment, we pick out four key points that speak to its quality, and present them with icons and headings that will actually be read, and actually be remembered.

Now let's talk about proving the quality of treatment. We've already discussed how that treatment is carried out — now we need to show patients, visually, what it actually achieves. That means photographic protocols of real clinical cases. Three to five cases are usually enough to demonstrate the clinic's calibre, and the dentists' skill in solving a particular problem. What matters most is that the patient sees several genuinely convincing cases dealing with the very problem they're facing themselves.

We won't dwell on whether you should adopt a photo protocol at all — everyone already knows precisely how it affects patient acquisition. Most clinics publish these on social media, but a website is genuinely far better suited to presenting the stages of treatment, and proper before-and-after case studies. A great deal of attention has gone into this on my own site, and I'll show you exactly how it's done. And if you'd like to understand better how to introduce a photo protocol at your own clinic, I've written an article covering the technical equipment involved, which you may find useful. Every one of my clients receives a thorough consultation, along with help choosing the most budget-friendly equipment that still produces genuinely striking photographs of clinical cases.

Can you feel how completely the design and content of a website change once it's been properly worked through, with every nuance genuinely thought out? I hope, by now, you can see just how misleading the phrase "the website doesn't work" really is, and that you recognise everything comes down to logic and design, presentation and layout.

I hope I've brought you a little closer to the view that a well-designed, thoroughly considered website is a powerful pillar supporting your practice's reputation, and one of the genuine core assets of your business.

If you need a genuinely good website, I've already put in an enormous amount of work to offer you excellent ready-made solutions, priced from 25,000 to 150,000 roubles.

If one of them suits you, we'll get it live on your domain quickly, adapt it to your practice, upload your photographs, and prepare thoughtful, considered text. Quickly, professionally, and without any risk to you.