Form -vs- Function
Today’s thoughts I want to talk about form vs function. We see this alot with dental websites out there that there’s a lot of only focus on the form or maybe they do focus on the function but it’s not the function that generates new patients and what I mean by that is we hear from a lot of docs that want to have automatic bill pay on their website and they want to have a log in system that patients can schedule their own appointments. Those things are novelty and cool but they’re not going to create new patients for you, you’re not going to get new patients in your practice or really in my opinion save a lot of staff time from paying from what I’ve been seeing several hundred dollars a month to have a system that allows patients to schedule their own appointments and from what I’ve seen from those systems you lose a lot of money because there’s no relationship. It’s something that a patient can log on and click and cancel their appointment, make an appointment, there has to be a relationship there, that is what is going to keep people coming back. A lot of website designers only look at form, a lot of dental websites out there are pretty and that’s all you can say for them but your dental website need to be doing a number of things beyond just being pretty. I’m sure everybody in your office thinks your websites great, you probably have patients coming in saying your website is great but I challenge you to look at the results, use a call tracking number and see what you’re getting. If your website has been up for six months and you’re not getting 50 phone calls a month or if your website has been up for 12 months and you’re not seeing 100 phone calls a month coming in from your dental website that should be a sign that something needs to change. Either your website is very pretty but it’s just not converting, we see a lot of different design flaws that run off new patients that are really pretty but run off new patients. Maybe your patients aren’t converting into phone calls, maybe you’re not following up, maybe people when they look at your website they are categorizing you as just a run of the mill dentist and they’re looking at what you do and thinking this guy just does what everybody else does I’m looking for somebody special, a dentist that is really going to take care of me. There can be a number of reasons why but make sure when you’re building your dental website it’s a lot more than just form. There’s a lot of function that goes into it and I don’t mean function as schedule appointments online because I don’t believe in that silliness I call it, a lot of functionality for communicating with your patients and setting yourself up to be the expert in their eyes.