POLAR LONDON
  • Home
  • About
  • What we do
  • Clients
  • Our work
  • Inspiration
  • Contact

Designing websites for Healthcare

2/22/2021

 
Picture
Responsive web design
Designing and building websites in the health and pharmaceutical sector is somewhat different to other typical website briefs.  

At Polar London we have built up our in-house experience to help clients tackle the common challenges when designing and building best in class websites for pharmaceutical products and targeting healthcare professionals.   
​
Here are the most common challenges we hear and how we help tackle them.

Our website can't show up on Google search?   
We often hear that the website is intended for healthcare professionals only, we cant have the site appearing on Google search?

There are simple steps from a development and UX point of view to take:
  • Ensuring that when any users arrives at the site, that we clearly signpost for medical professionals vs steering the general public to the appropriate content. 
  • From a development perspective we configure robots.txt files to prevent spiders, review all HTTP headers and Metatags to be configured to actively discourage search engines from indexing the site.  
​These simple techniques are part of our process and help solve SEO.
Picture
Search engine optimisation
How can we easily manage references? 

Understanding the importance of legal and medical referencing is something we commonly come across, from a process and implementation perspective. 

Working within content management systems (CMS) that are able to easily configure referencing should be common practice. 

We recommend platforms such as Wordpress - for easy CMS capabilities, which empowers our clients and content writers to easily manage, add and remove references throughout a website in a few simple steps.      

We need a simple legal approval process?
Picture
Legal copy and approvals
​Stakeholder management and approvals are obviously an important part of medical related content and publications online. We use simple staging environments for a phased approval cycle.  

Staging: This environment would be a replica of the live site where our clients, legal teams and writers can update content and share via a browser (which is password protected), for internal and external approvals. 

Production: Once staging is approved we move all amends to the production environment for final quality assurance and sign off before publishing.  

Live: The live website sits on a secure hosting platform and can easily be updated through the above steps and approvals.  

Content 'One click away'
​
Its common for prescribing information and other legal requirements (T+C's / privacy / disclaimer/ references) needing to be one click away at all times, we consider this at the early UX stages and integrated as part of the core build and quality assurance process. 

Accessibility & Performance
Picture
W3C Accessibility
Performance monitoring is always an option to consider.  Dependent on visitor levels and content server configurations can be made as part of a recommended maintenance agreement.
​
Our sites have microcaching enabled to reduce load on database servers. *meaning the site wont crash with an influx of traffic. 

W3C compliance 

Taking into consideration that accessibility will be key for users, there are measures we can take to ensure an accessible experience. 

For users with lower bandwidth and or data access, hearing or visual disabilities, there are measures we can take as part of the design and build process, we would built the site and core content with lower rez /load capabilities, enabling all user to access the core information. 

We recommend using WCAG checklist to track accessibility. Useful tool for AA compliance testing, covering points such as;
  • Captions 
  • Audio description 
  • Contrast 
  • text size 
  • image text 
  • labels 
  • language 
  • consistent navigation 
  • identification 
  • error messaging and prevention 

Simple, clean design and coding does lend itself well to smaller page downloads, increasing speed and access quality to the end user experience.   

See our article on Web design trends for 2021.

Conclusion
  • Managing visitor expectations with clear sign posting  
  • There are simple best practices to follow for not appearing on search engines
  • Early stage development planning can assist when it comes to a simplified legal approval processes 
  • Its key to consider early stage planning during UX to solve 'one click away' requirements    
  • Accessibility can make the difference to someone consuming, accessing and sharing your content

Author: Alex Birch 
If you learnt something new from this article then sign up to our news letter and share to hear more. 
 

Comments are closed.

    Categories

    All
    Meet Our Founder
    New Wins For Polar
    Social
    Web Design

      News letter 

      If you sign up, we will send you an email once a quarter, with a link to our most popular articles and our latest creative work. 

      Don't worry we wont spam you! 
    Subscribe

    Author

    Alex Birch, Founder of Polar and Senior production director 

    Archives

    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    May 2020

Polar Advertising LTD | London| 114-115 Tottenham Court Road | W1T 5AH | TEL: +44 7873 384355 | E: info@polarlondon.co.uk