Does Your Website Get An "A"???

I know there is a lot of movement and excitement these days about social media and social networking - BUT we cannot forget about our websites. This may not be a very contemporary opinion in the web 2.0 world - but I believe that your website is the backbone of your hospital's online marketing efforts.

Your website should contain all of the who, what, where, when, and hows about your organization. What positions are available at your facility, who is on your medical staff (with pictures), where your clinics are, what services you provide, etc..etc...

There are many companies that will evaluate your website searching for consulting and redesign opportunities - and like anything else, they are trying to get into your wallet. They tend to throw around terms like "Google PageRank", "Inbound Links", "Traffic Rank", etc..etc..

While we can spend many hours dissecting and analyzing these various terms - and there are certainly many companies out there that will do that for you - I would certainly encourage you to get an understanding of how your website stacks up with your competitors.

Sure your pictures are pretty, you have a great logo, it is laid out well, all of the buttons work - this is functionality and asthtetics to me.

What is really important is "Are people finding your website?" - "Are they using all of the nice features you have set up? - "What sort of traffic is it generating?"

Below is a link to a report that I ran that compares two of my favorite hospital association websites - www.tha.org (Texas Hospital Association) and www.ihaonline.org (Iowa Hospital Association). Both of these websites contain a lot of great information, both have solid social media utilization, and both look very professionally done.

http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=www.tha.org/index.asp

As you will see - www.tha.org has a website grade of "85" as compared to www.ihaonline.org with an "84" - both an excellent score and well deserving of being "gold standard" hospital association websites.

This comparison was run using www.websitegrader.com service - I have no financial interest in this company - they do not charge for this service and there is no registration requirement.

The action step for your report would be to take this to your website designer and show them the data/information. I would make sure that they address whatever deficiencies are identified in your report. Hopefully they will be able to make the necessary changes, with the end result being a much more solid website that gets you more meaningful traffic and utilization.