When during discovery meeting you ask a client what they still like and want to keep from their existing website and they reply with “nothing at all, burn it to the ground” you know it’s going to be a fun job. We were given complete license to come up with an entirely new game plan for them as their old site was little more than an online business card with a few articles about their specialties. It also became clear during the planning stage that what we really needed to do here was come up with the content plan first and then let the content dictate what sort of website we build.
View Their Old Website
What followed was a complete ground-up reimagining of their web strategy. Pages would be written for a long list of conditions for which their clients would typically come to them to treat. These would be written with keyword research and targeted marketing in mind, and each page would include a section near the bottom featuring some “related treatments” for how OK Spine may be able to help. Treatment pages would set expectations for before, during, after, and recovery which would be useful for both new visitors and existing patients making their website an information hub. This content-rich tie in between the condition pages and the treatment pages would be the site’s new feature focus.
There were other ideas both discussed internally and brought up by the client such as a “pain assessment survey” and how that should behave, but we also needed to consider HIPAA and how much information it would be safe to request of someone and what would be considered personal health information which would require end-to-end encryption and special hosting considerations to make sure that such data was protected. In the end, out of budget concerns, those features were pulled back to just be a lead capture form that simply included a list of symptoms and a better to worst set of choices which would transmit only their numeric indicator of scale, not actual conditions, meaning their staff could compare it to internal charts that matched the system but the data out of context would be useless.
The rest of the site was typical content about their offices, doctors, testimonials, downloadable PDFs of common documents, and simple links to their third party financing and billing providers. To wrap it all up for the client they also wanted to be empowered to manage all content themselves going forward, so in addition to making sure commonly used design elements were saved in Gutenberg as presets or reusable blocks for easy implementation, I also wrote an “owner’s manual” documenting all their site’s features. It covered all common processes and tools with which they’re likely to interact including how to manage the entries from their site’s capture forms.
