Supplement-Follow these tips to develop strong Web site
Because your Web site is a marketing tool, you must start with a marketing strategy to have an effective Web page for your same-day surgery program, says Cheryl Iverson, director of system communications for Promina Health System, an Atlanta-based system of hospitals that include hospital-based and freestanding ambulatory surgery programs.
Once you have identified your goals, your target market, and the results you expect to achieve, find a Web page designer who has the experience needed to create a site that will meet your needs, she says.
While the telephone book is filled with firms identified as Web page designers, Iverson suggests that you start by browsing the Internet and finding other health care sites that you like. "When you see a Web site you like, contact the organization and find out who produced it," she suggests. Talk to several contractors and obtain written proposals from them before you choose, she adds.
Iverson and Tony Westhoff, RN, administrator of the Westlake Surgical Center in Seattle, hired outside contractors to develop their Web pages because they did not have the expertise in-house. Costs for Web page design vary depending on the complexity of the site and the amount of information the designer needs to create.
Iverson's site originally was created with 300 pages and cost $50,000. The Promina site not only includes links to physician Web sites and individual facility Web sites, but also handles seminar registrations for seminars offered at all facilities within the system.
Other activities conducted through the Web site include a job bank that lists openings at all facilities and a news center that lists announcements, news of the system, and links to drkoop.com, a national health and medical information system.
"The Web page design firm did not have to create text," Iverson says. "We were able to provide them with brochures and other publications that already had the information we wanted to present on the Web page."
Providing the text does save money because it reduced the number of hours the design firm needed to work on the project. Hourly charges for design firms can range from $50 to $150 per hour, says James Sposto, president of Sposto Productions, a Web page design firm with offices in Cootztown, PA, and Memphis, TN. In some cases, creation of the text can double the project cost, he adds.
Whenever you hire an outside contractor, ensure you hire someone with skills and experience that will help you create the results you want. Iverson suggests that the Web page designer you choose should:
• Understand your marketing strategy.
Make sure your contractor understands marketing as well as web page design, says Iverson. Otherwise, you may end up with an attractive Web site that doesn't accomplish your marketing goals.
• Know how people move through Web sites.
Not only should your Web page attract visitors, but it should be easy to move around, giving people a chance to access different types of information, she says.
• Handle registration of domain names.
Choosing a domain name, or address, that makes sense to people who are looking for you is important.
Even more important is registering every version of the domain name you can imagine so that another organization can't use it and confuse your patients, physicians, or community, says Iverson. The cost is minimal at only $50 per name, she says. "We are promina.org, but we've also registered as promina.net, prominahealth. org, prominahospital.org, and several other versions. When someone accesses any version that we've registered, it automatically connects them with our primary site."
Unfortunately, someone else has registered promina.com before her system. When this situation happens, you can offer to buy the registration rights from the original owner, she adds.
• Handle registration with search engines.
Helping people find your site, even if they don't know your name, means registering with Yahoo! and other search services on the Internet.
"Our contractor did a great job making sure we were registered with services accurately so that we would show up whenever any person searched for health topics that applied to us," says Iverson.
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