Veterinarian Website Structure Tips
1) Home Page
The home page of a veterinarian website should have the same rules that go with any website that is created. The importance of the website home page is that a visitor to the site should:
- Know exactly where they are. Having your logo and/or name visible on the screen is important. If your logo/name is not seen it would be very easy for a visitor to leave not knowing where they are.
- Have a guide to getting around the rest of the website. Most menu’s on a website are either horizontal or vertical. I have a preference for horizontal menu’s in the header of the website. This allows someone visiting the site to first see where they are, and then have a guide to get around the sub pages in your site.
- Have quick links to your major sub pages. For veterinarians, this would be to your services. Having your major services stand out will help you to lead your visitors to the places you want them to go, and that is to find out what you have to offer.
- Have an introduction. My belief is that having an introduction paragraph of some sorts will allow your visitors the chance to know a little about you that will hopefully lead them to explore more of your website, which hopefully will lead you to new clients.
2) Sub Pages
a) Services
It is important for any company that is services based to show off the services that are offered. As a matter of fact, if you are mainly a service based company, you need to make sure these are major sub pages. This means that they are added somewhere in your template as a way to get people to take a look at the services you offer. When presenting your services you should think about the following:
- List all of the services you offer. If someone comes and does not see what you offer, and they are in need of reproduction services, but you do not offer these services, this is a waste of time. The opposite could also be said of someone who does not contact you because you do not list a specific service and they leave thinking you do not offer the service, when in reality you do.
- Description of services. Have a description of each of your services could be helpful in the persuading of someone to contact you in regard to one of the services.
- Photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words. Have a picture that can be put with your service is a great idea.
b) Forms
A great use for a website is how it can handle some of your office work for you. Having the ability to download forms from your website can save a client/new client some time when they come to your clinic. This also can save you on some small paper expenses.
c) Documents
Putting the documents of your services and pricing can give people all the information they need before they have to contact you to ask you these questions.
d) Seminars
If your clinic holds seminars, this could be a very valuable page to have. The seminar could list your seminars with links to sub pages to more information about each seminar. Then the sub page for the seminar could tell all of the details of the seminar, forms to sign up, credit card processing for someone to pay, maps for directions, etc..
e) Contact Page
Having a contact page is important for any website. Having a contact page with mailing address, staff e-mail’s, a quick contact form, a map that gives driving instructions is VERY helpful.
3) Interactive Tools
Adding interactivity to your website can be helpful to your clinic and your clients/visitors. Adding interactive tools that do all the work for you is extremely helpful. Here are some possible tools to add to the site:
- Photo Gallery. Great way to show off your clinic, your staff, and your clients. Most galleries are designed so that you can easily upload the photo, tell it where to be shown, and it will show up there.
- Contact Forms. Have a form that someone can fill in and then send it to you is very helpful.
- Blog. Blogs are search engine attention grabbers. Not only that, but they can be insightful for your clients/visitors for educational purposes.A blog can be set up to be one page or it can be set up to be a whole site inside of a site.
- Print Page. A good example of this is that you offer driving directions to your clinic. When someone enters their address, a map will show the exact directions from where they are starting all the way to your clinic. If someone wanted to print these directions they would print them plus your whole web page. With a print page script it would be possible for them to only print the map and directions.
There are other tools that can be added, it all varies from site to site.
Summary
If you are going to build a website for your business, I hope you can keep one thing in mind: Have it done right. There is no point in having a sloppy website built because it only cost a couple hundred dollars. This will come back to be a waste of time and money over the long run. Plan a well thought out website with someone who can meet your needs and be a valuable resource to your business success online.
Each website will be different in the tastes of the site and the needs. The goal of YOUR site is to make sure that it can meet all of your needs and goals, and be a valuable assest to your growing success. Keep in mind also that is should be helpful to those who visit the site and for each of your clients.
Rob
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Windholme Farm is an Arabian breeding farm in Orange VA breeding beautiful, athletic Half-Arabians. They stand a couple stallions and have a wonderful group of broodmares. You can visit them at www.windholmefarm.com.
Windholme Farm was designed with keeping a navigation system in mind that would allow people to find different pages in a simple yet elegant style. This brought us to designing a nagivation system that is a drop down menu under a top hierarchy.
The farm was in need of an avenue to market and sell their horses. We created a sales division of the site that allows them to add horse, photo, pedigree, and more right from a content management system. By doing this they can use up to the minute information about show results, new pictures, and more.
The funnest part of the site for Windholme is their gallery. With the photo gallery they have a private admin panel that allows them to create albums and put as many pictures as they desire in each album.
With this site I wanted to show off the horses that we have been blessed to take care of and do so in a minimized fashion. So most of the pages have interactive tabs on them besides the home page. The home page shows off some of the stallions that have been at stud at our farm in the past couple of years.
As I mentioned above, the sub pages have tabs that allow people to view different content on the page by clicking on different tabs. The tabs are interactive and they do not require the page to change, which is helpful for those with a slow connection.
Our contact page also has tabs so a visitor can see content if they want to contact us offline or they can choose to use a form on the page to send us a message via email.
Rose Hill had a photo gallery implemented for clients and visitors to get more familiar with the practice. This gallery is totally controlled by the clinic right from their own computers.
One of the imporant additions that Rose Hill needed was a way for clients and visitors to know how to get to the clinic. So we decided to free up some of their phone time by using maps with interactive directions on the site for people to get driving directions from where they are coming from.
