When was the last time you navigated through your whole veterinary website?

Has it been 6 months? A year? More?

Make your veterinary website do more for you, your clients, and your potential clients by doing just a little at a time at the beginning of 2017. And if you’re not sure where to start, we’ll help lay it out for you…

January 2017 – March 2017
(10 – 15 minutes per day)

Read every page on your website at the rate of 1 page per day. Look at the page’s traffic analytics; do visitors even come to this page? Could it be removed altogether to streamline your navigation?

Make a note – starting with the URL of the page you are working on – about the things that you feel should be changed or updated on the page. Also, be sure to look at your pages on both a traditional monitor, as well as a tablet and phone screen.

The older your veterinary website is the more likely you are to notice:

•    Minor errors
•    Information that is no longer accurate
•    Links that no longer work
•    Photographs with former employees
•    Photographs that are “crunchy”
•    Information that is extraneous and repetitive
•    Information that your clients need, but is missing
•    Social networking profiles that aren’t linked to this site
•    Pages that break or lose content on smaller screens

You should work with your webmaster or help desk to get these taken care of as you go. You can save items on your list and submit them to your expert on a weekly basis, or at a rate deemed workable by your point of contact.

For things that will require more time to improve or fix, like:

•    Photographs that need to be replaced
•    Content that could be edited or rewritten
•    Content that could be removed
•    Pages that break or lose content on smaller screens

Keep your notes on these items and once you’ve finished going through your whole website, you’ll use them to improve it even more…

April 2017 – June 2017
(1 hour per week)

Using your notes as a guide, prepare to overhaul your website.

If you have photos of your staff and facilities that you’d like to go through and replace, you can do that. If you need to hire a photographer to come in and take new photos of your staff and facility to replace the out of date photos on your website, this would be the ideal time for that.

If you felt that the wording on your website was confusing, extraneous or difficult to follow, now is the time to edit this content (either yourself or with the assistance of a professional writer and editor).

If you found unnecessary, cluttered content, now is the time to remove this excess content (either yourself or with the assistance of a professional writer and editor).

Work with your webmaster or help desk to get these items taken care of as you go.

July 2017 – December 2017
(2 hours per month)

Once all of your planned changes are in place, go back through your website, a little at a time and make sure that the changes you’ve made over the past several months make sense when as a whole.

So that you won’t get caught in such a grind ever again, make a plan to keep your website relevant and updated from here on out. Consider having a different person at your practice go through the website every couple of months, you’ll be amazed what new perspectives you’ll get.

If you don’t currently have a blog on your website consider adding one. Even one new entry per month can mean a significant boost in your traffic. If you don’t feel comfortable making regular updates to your website or blog, can you delegate this to someone in your office? If not, you may be able to hire someone to do so in the future as well.

At Beyond Indigo, we know that your digital identity begins and ends with your website, and we are committed to helping you have the best site possible. If you feel that it is time to start fresh, or to do a more in-depth overhaul, please contact us for a consultation.