Chiropractic Web Design Its Importance and Best Practices
A website is essential for marketing your chiropractic clinic online. It provides an accessible channel where potential customers can find information about your services, prices, and location. It also serves as a platform where you can show them your successful cases and previous patients’ testimonials for your clinic. A website can even serve as a way to educate your audience about chiropractic care and provide actionable information that can help them in their day-to-day lives. All of these benefits provided by a chiropractic website will help you reach more people and serve more patients with your services
But, just like a physical storefront or clinic, your website also needs a good design to be effective in realizing the benefits mentioned. In this article, you will learn why good chiropractic web design is important, what your audience expects from your web design, and what are the best practices that you can implement for it.
Why Good Web Design is Important
1. Helps create a positive impression
Your website design gives your audience their first impression when they visit your website. Creating a good first impression is critical for encouraging them to browse your website and for increasing the chances of them inquiring about your services or becoming your patients. Moreover, your web design influences how your audience sees your brand. If it looks unappealing and outdated, they are more likely to associate the same impression with your chiropractic practice.
2. Supports your website’s search engine optimization
Aside from creating an appealing look for your website, web design also helps with your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). This is due to search engines looking into how your visitors behave while they are on your website. If your visitors do not exit immediately after opening your page and spend a significant time browsing it, search engines will interpret this as your website is a valuable source of information for their users’ search queries. This leads to search engines giving your website a higher search engine ranking for its niche and target keywords.
3. Creates consistency in your audience’s eyes
A well-designed website must have the same fonts, layout, and styles for all of its pages. This creates a consistent look. This increases your audience’s familiarity with your website and brand. This familiarity helps with your audience’s recall of your brand so they are more likely to go back to your website when they are ready to convert as a lead or customer for your chiropractic services.
Principles of Good Chiropractic Web Design
Here are the bare minimum requirements for you to achieve a professional chiropractic website design:
1. Aligned with the needs of your website’s user
Your website users have an intention when they visit one of its pages. Its design must help these users achieve their intention. When a user can easily achieve what they need to do on your website, they are more likely to browse more of your pages or convert as a lead or customer.
For example, your most common website visitors are most likely to be those looking for a solution to a problem they have, such as body aches and posture problems. You can make it easier for them to find what they need by placing a link in your navigation bar that leads to a page that categorizes your content according to problem areas in the body.
This is the same for visitors who want to learn more about your services or to make an appointment in your clinic. You must create the appropriate links and place them in the navigation bar for their convenience. Examples of these include service pages, a contact us page, and a call to action for an appointment.
2. A simple yet appealing design
Color
Your color palette must fit your brand and must influence a positive sentiment toward your brand. Limit your selection of colors to no more than four colors. Common colors for health and medical practitioners include blue for inspiring trustworthiness, orange for showing vitality, and white for signifying purity or cleanliness.
Typography
The fonts you use in your website must command attention and convey your brand’s visual interpretation. Your fonts must be legible and you should only use a maximum of three fonts on your website.
Imagery
Photos, videos, illustrations, and other graphic mediums can communicate a thousand words about your brand. Use these to add personality and break up blocks of text in your design. It is important to use imagery that complements your brand and supports the impression you want to create in your visitors’ minds.
3. A simple, intuitive, and consistent navigation system
The first thing that any user must understand upon landing any page on your website is how to navigate it. A good navigation system allows your visitors to find the page or information they are looking for quickly and easily. You can achieve this by creating a navigation menu located in a prominent location of the page that functions in a way users will have no trouble figuring out.
The navigation menu should only have a limited number of items to avoid looking cluttered and overwhelming the user. Menu titles should also use short and descriptive words so that users can predict what they can expect to find when they click it. Lastly, there should be no more than two levels in your top navigation menu.
4. An f-shaped pattern for the page layout
There are different ways you can arrange the elements of your website’s pages. But, the f-shaped layout caters the best to the natural behavior of online users. It takes advantage of people’s tendency to view a web page starting from the top left of the page, scanning the top of the page from left to right then moving down to do the same for the next row of content. Users will then start scanning when they get to the bulk of the page’s content before starting to scroll through the rest of it.
An f-shaped layout situates the home button and your brand logo on the left of the topmost row of the page with the other navigation menu links taking up the rest of the row. In the next row, you will have your brand’s tagline or unique value proposition if it’s the homepage, or the headline if the page is an article. Lastly, the call to action will either be right below the homepage’s second row, on the right-most part of the top navigation menu, or on the right sidebar.
5. A grid-based layout
A grid-based layout will create a structure for your page and its contents that looks organized and clean. It arranges your content in a way that makes it easy for your website users to scan, read, and understand the contents of its pages. And, this arrangement makes the overall look of your page pleasing to the eye.
There are four types of grid layouts – block, column, modular, and hierarchical. Each type has its best use case in your professional chiropractic website design. Here are some of them:
Block grid
This has the simplest structure and is often used for continuous blocks of text that may include photos, videos, and other graphics such as blog and article pages.
Column grid
This arranges the contents of the pages into two or more columns. The column grid is best used for pricing pages of your different service packages.
Modular grid
This layout utilizes columns and rows to arrange equally sized modules containing graphics and text. Modular grids are often used for category pages, image galleries, and article or blog entry lists.
Hierarchical grid
This layout has a freestyle arrangement with column widths and row heights that vary throughout the page. The hierarchical grid is best applied to your homepage and about page where you can create order but still avoid being boring in the eyes of your audience.
6. A mobile-friendly web design
Your website’s design must have a responsive layout so that it can adjust to the screen sizes of the different devices your audience uses to access your website. This is a critical feature of modern web design since a significant number of internet users browse websites through their smartphones and other mobile devices.
Moreover, your audience must have an easy time scanning and reading the contents of your pages. This requires breaking up your paragraphs and sentences into shorter ones and using fonts and font sizes that your audience can easily read on their mobile devices.
7. A Design that load fast
Your website design must not slow down your page load speed. Or else, your website will lose visitors and suffer from lower search engine ranking. At the minimum, any page on your website should load within two seconds.
To ensure fast load speeds, you should limit your website design elements to only what is necessary. And, any elements you use must be lightweight to minimize their effects on your website’s page loading time.
Great Chiropractic Web Design Goes a Long Way
Website design is one of the important elements that influence how well your website can attract visitors and convert people into leads or customers. If you want your website to have the best chance of generating more patients for your chiropractic practice, a good website design is a necessity.
If you want to improve your results from your website, Big Market Solutions can help you! Contact us today and schedule your free marketing consultation with us!