8 Medical Website Design Tips for Healthcare Professionals

From medical practitioners to insurance providers, to reach a wider audience, you need a well-designed website that promotes professionalism and care. For that, here are eight design tips that you need to keep in mind when developing your medical website. 

Color Palette

Medical website designs need to be modest. Strobe effects, vibrant colors, and high contrast don’t work well for medical websites. As a healthcare professional, your website should radiate professionalism and subtleness. Colors like deep red, violet, and bright green can work; but often don’t.

Depending on your profession and website type, shades of blue, white, and purple can do wonders. 

Let’s consider a picture:

As you can see, the first red block attracts the eyes, and the blue drive them away from it. As a medical website, you don’t want to attract too much attention to the graphics. 

Choose the color palette of your web pages according to the mood of the page, and consider not going overboard. However, for some services, colors that can catch the attention immediately would fit. If the healthcare service is more on urgent services such as emergency response, then red is the way to go.

Typography

Typography plays a major role in any website design. Your website is going to be visited by patients who might have visual impairments or mental health issues. As they might not be able to comprehend tough-to-read fonts, Sans-serifs and Serifs are the best font families for medical websites. 

Monospace fonts can also be adapted but never cursive. Cursive fonts are…cursive and are tough to navigate through when in distress. 

A website design agency NYC suggests using Comic-sans or Bradley Hand if your website is for children or early teens, as it is friendlier to look at. However, these fonts shouldn’t be your main fonts, as your medical website should still mean business.

It is also advisable to use fonts for headings and subheadings that are different from your text blocks. Bold out the headings if that goes with your theme, but don’t choose the same fonts for everything. 

Let’s again look at some examples:

The second cursive font can be considered as creative liberty, but it’s advisable not to use fonts that are similar to the cursive-1.

Use Images

Images that depict emotions such as happiness and fulfillment should be used to enhance your website. The patients and caregivers have already seen the worst, so you don’t need to remind them about the horrors of the services that you provide. They should be made aware of the outcome that they can relish by availing of your services. 

If you are an organization that provides medical insurance, use images that consist of happy families and children. Happy pets with owners can also be included in some images to illustrate the fact that their pets also need them to be well. 

Be careful when using images. Don’t overdo it. You must consider that the individuals visiting your website might not be in the mood to relish the images and need emergency care. The presence of overabundant images can make website navigation difficult.  

Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

What makes a medical website navigable? Clearly defined menus and resources. Don’t design your medical website in such a way that complicates the contact or booking process. Don’t clutter your home page with information that’s only relevant to a fraction of your audience. Consider your home page as a portal to other relevant pages. Keep general information at the top and precisely define the resource links with minimal text. 

List your services and resources and link them. Write a brief “About us” and direct it to the extensive parts.

Tech websites are comparatively more complicated than medical websites. And as tech individuals like to have all the information under the same roof and are acclimated to read documentation, it works for them.

A medical website is visited by a wide range of personnel, and it needs to cater to them equally. 

Accessible PHI documents

If you are an organization that provides medical services, you must comply with HIPAA guidelines. And you are required to make patient health information (PHI) accessible to patients through your website. Although security plays a major role, accessibility is equally critical. While designing your website, consider making PHI available by providing a secure pipeline or a bare minimum official email address. 

The patients or caregivers should be able to navigate through the PHI portals and submit their queries to you easily. Having a separate page dedicated to PHI and linking it to the footer of the website is considered the best practice. But you have the liberty to change the position according to your preference and the theme of the website.  

Overall Performance and Optimization

Optimize your website for performance and mobile-friendliness. Unless your website is exclusive to be accessed by desktop or laptop, 90% of your visitors will access it through their mobile devices. Not regarding the mobile users will jeopardize your business and can be considered a HIPAA violation if PHI is involved. 

Web Content

Prominently showcase your compliance and certification document at the bottom of your websites and provide enough information about them to separate yourself from your competitors. 

Not only medical certificates, though. If your website is used to transact money, consider SSL and HTTPS certificates in accordance with PCI to ensure your visitors that their monetary interests are also safe with you. 

Long forms scare the visitors away. Keep your forms as short as possible until it’s necessary to do so. As your contact page isn’t the one that requires your patients to enter their full details, consider keeping it that way. If you must know the whereabouts, divide the forms into separate steps.

The Bottom Line

Your website is your gateway to the internet. Medical websites need to be soothing, navigable, and accessible. Design your websites in a way that clearly shows you are here to help the ones in distress and have enough credibility to do so. Keep your contact page and forms easier to fill in to facilitate more conversations.