Wondering if you should design your own dental practice website?
Here are some important considerations to keep in mind when deciding whether to go it alone or hire a professional to build a webpage for your practice.
The Dental Practice Website: Design Your Own or Hire a Professional?
As a dentist, you know that you need a website in today’s competitive environment: your online presence acts as an ad for your business, builds your personal brand, and even has the potential to attract new patients.
If you don’t yet have a website for your dental practice, or if you’re looking to have your current site redesigned, you may be trying to decide between hiring a professional web developer versus simply building the page yourself.
Here are a few considerations before you make that final crucial decision about your dental practice webpage.
Your Dental Practice Website: The Cons of Trying to Build it Yourself
As exciting and fun as it may sound to build your own dental practice website, there are definite cons to going it alone.
For the majority of dentists, their professional time is best spent performing dentistry: taking care of patients is what generates the highest revenue for a dental practice. And because most dental practices are small businesses, there are other demands on dentists’ time as well, including training, professional development, and managing the team.
Throwing web design into the mix of demands might be a bit much.
After all, designing a website is far more time-consuming and complex than most people expect. While website template platforms provide great options for dental practice websites, most of them still require the expertise of a software developer to make them work correctly.
And even if you’re a tech-savvy dentist, there’s plenty going on besides web coding to make a website work. Think about it:
- Do you have the skills to write targeted, engaging copy that’s both readable and key-word/key-phrase rich?
- Are you familiar with optimizing images for the web?
- How well do you know UX and Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices?
- Do you understand how to maintain your website and keep it current once it’s built?
The problem with building your own website is that, while it may seem easy enough, it has the potential to become one of those nightmare projects that costs you far more time and money than you expected – all without producing the desired result.
The Best Dental Practice Websites are Built by the Experts
The reality is that no matter how hard us laypeople may try our hand at tech, the best websites are built by experts. Web developers focus solely on the ins and outs of your website, while you focus on what really matters: running your business.
Most dentists have a high profit per doctor hour when they’re working on patients in their dental practice. When you look at the opportunity cost on your time, you always come out ahead by hiring an expert to design your dental practice website. The investment in redesigning or developing a new website is nearly always less than a dentist’s own profit per doctor hour – meaning, you’re better off financially practicing dentistry, and paying an expert to build you a beautiful website that will actively attract new patients.
Just like your patients pay you for your expertise, it makes sense to pay someone with experience to provide you a website for your dental practice.
Hiring Someone to Create Your Dental Practice Website? Here’s What to Consider
There are several things to consider when looking for someone to create your dental practice website. There are several components to building a successful website. You need the technical side, as well as the marketing and artistic sides. Typically a “web developer” will only help with the technical parts of the website, and not consult on design elements. Sometimes developers will offer both services, but
A good website has several successful components: the technical side, an adherence to user experience (UX) best practices, and an understanding of marketing, industry, and design.
Typically, a web developer will only help with the technical (i.e., coding) parts of the website, and not consult on design elements. Sometimes developers will offer both services, but the best developers tend to partner with web designers.
It’s more comment to have both a web developer, as well as a design consultant and copy editor.
Once your website is built, you’ll also need to decide if the vendors you worked with will also run and maintain your site — this is an ongoing job to keep your site not only functional but also high in search engine rankings.
At ClearEdge Innovation, we’re here to help you with building or redesigning your dental practice website.
We have team members with expertise in designing all aspects of your dental website, and whose expertise range from web development to SEO, online marketing, and web writing for the dental industry.
Contact us today to find out more.
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