Put your Practice on the Web - Practice tips 6

Have a web presence by setting up a practice website. It is your business card on the web. It allows your patients to get a view of your practice and a chance to evaluate your practice beforehand. This gives them a chance to build trust and gain confidence in you before they see you for the first time. It also saves phonecalls if you publish often needed information such as your prenatal information leaflet or package. Patients have access to it around the clock. Your leflet can answer the question if it is OK to e.g. take a certain medication during pregnancy. You can post office hours, telephone numbers, procedures you do, areas of specialisation, directions etc on your website.

Websites from MEDEM are reasonably priced, but look a little stodgy and dry. Medem is a corporation that unites many medical societies on the web. Their biggest plus are the great links that you can place on your website. For example, you can post links to numerous ACOG leaflets for free! Given the price of $18 for 50 leaflets that alone is worth the subscription for the website. ACOG’s “Physician finder” leads patients who are looking for a physician to your website. You have limited, but reasonable choices for customization.

The people from "Healthcare Success Strategies" will write and design your website in a very bice and possibly very succesful fashion - for about $7000. The websites from Healthcare Success Strategies that I have seen look excellent and are very well written. They also do write in the correct keywords that give you higher ratings right from the start. It seems expensive, but might be worth it.
My impression on ratings in the following: Content is key. If you have good content, you are better off. Skip the flash introductions, the spiders cannot read it and it slows down the loading of the site. Keywords are very important. When planning a website you should go to Yahoo and another website that shows you which words / keywords are searched the most. This could be prenatal care, baby, pregnancy, the name of your town etc. Use those words often and repetitively in everything you write.
I would be careful with "search engine optimization services" and possibly stick with those affiliated with and recommended by the web hosting service.

There are a number of services that offer ready-to-go websites for very affordable monthly fees. The least expensive and quite good one is: 1&1 web hosting. It gives you the biggest bang for the buck. It has numerous templates of good quality, although the better looking ones cost extra, and it gives you great control over your website.

Other similar services are : Yahoo, which has recently improved their templates, GoDaddy, and then the infinite number of smaller service providers.

1and1 webhosting, Google and GoDaddy have links to webdesigners that can customize your site.

Google has a service, which is in beta right now (12 06) called page creator, which allows you to publish your pages. This may turn into a full fledged website software (conveniently free, like most Google services).

You also can publish your information, your patient instructions, thoughts and links on "Blogger", which is probably the least expensive web presence you can get. You can set up the "favorites" as your index or as links to the most read info leaflets, and you can use the "profile" to direct your patients how to use your Blog as your patient information system. Insert many links and your patients will find what they are looking for.

Be careful with web designers and hosting services that "specialize on doctors", since they tend to charge more than others. After all doctors are rich, right?. Correspondingly they usually target colleagues with higher incomes such as dentists, orthodontists and plastic surgeons.

Should you be a bit more computer savvy, you could set up your website yourself or with some help. You could also hire someone form a nearby college to set it up for you or you could post your website project as a job on Guru.com. Guru.com is site that posts jobs for programmers and software people in general. You post the job, assign a payment and the programmers email you and offer their services. No obligation. Very helpful. take a look at it.

You could also ask your hospital IT department to give you recommendations about local software people that might help you set up and or maintain your website.

Should you want to do a good part of your website building yourself, you will find good website templates go to Allwebco.com. I especially like the "Graphix" series of templates - very cool! Also take a look at templatemonster.com. Templatemonster is a company that constantly develops and designs new website templates, from simple to fancy. You should know that they have a large number of resellers, so you may find their website templates on numerous websites under different names.

Learn about Google. Google is not only the gateway to the Internet, the way to find whatever you are looking for, the new phonebook and the closest thing to the "answer man". Google has a number of nifty and free tools: Gmail, "Docs and Spreadsheets", Blogger, Pagecreator (a web publishing tool) and Google Analytics. Docs and Spreadsheets is interesting and I use it daily. It is the equivalent of having Word and Excel online. It is especially useful if you routinely work on many computers (home, travel, office, hospital) and work on a project. With Google Docs and Spreadsheets you can continue writing on your text wherever you are. You can also allow others to collaborate on your projects, which is great when you have to write policies or consensus papers.
Also get to know Google hacks, learn ways to speed up your search and learn how to better find what you are looking for.
Don't forget to list your office on "Local Business" of Google and, if you want, on its equivalent on Yahoo. Go to their websites and follow the links.