Creating your dental website, although easy to put up and maintain these days, however, in every online business, presentation is everything. Poorly created dentist website design can easily forgotten by visitors. One of the advantages of technology is that the latest advances can make our lives easier. No where is this more evident than in the world of online promotion. When promoting your dental practice online, you may be tempted to use a template as provided by one of the big internet companies (Yahoo, Google, etc.), and why not? They’re ready-made, you don’t have to be a web guru to assemble them, and changes can be made with the click of a mouse. But is this always a good thing? Well, if you’re trying to make your dental practice stand out in the marketplace, then the answer is, “no”. There are many reasons why you would not want to use a dental template site.
First, dentist website design templates are fraught with design limitations. Any template you work with is going to limit the size of your webpage. Not only that, but templates are only allocated a fixed number of components per page such as headers, windows, links, and text. In addition, these components are only available in a limited number of shapes and colors. If you think circular shapes and earth tones don’t exactly suit your practice, you’re out of luck.
Second, the meta data coding of dental website templates are identical from site to site. Search engines look for unique meta data in a site. It is the singular quality of this data that helps a site come up in a search. Unfortunately, most templates have identical meta data associated with their templates. The result is that template sites are often overlooked by search engines.
Third, dental website templates don’t allow users to incorporate design elements of their own. If there is a logo or a personalized font you have been using for years to promote your practice, you will not be able to incorporate it into a website template’s flash effects or headers.
Fourth, there is no opportunity to own your website design. Let’s say you manage within the confines of a template to build a webpage that you like, but you are unhappy with the company that provided the template and hosts the site. Can you pack up the website and move it to another company to host? The answer is, “no”. The templates made available will only work on the host’s server, making a transfer of the site to another server impossible.
Fifth, the accessibility of a dental template can be a drawback in terms of time and flexibility. Most dentists do not have the time to adequately build and maintain a site. Site maintenance is a labor-intensive process that not only involves knowing how to assemble a site, but also how to troubleshoot if things go awry. With a dental template site, it is up to the dental professional to correct and maintain the site. If things go wrong on the template site, you can expect a number of wasted hours before the problem is fixed. This is not a problem with custom designed websites which offer the option of self-editing for the dental professional, or the website design company can do the editing.
Sixth, dental template websites only offer a limited number of templates. Sure, there is some flexibility in terms of color and fonts, but these variations are not enough to set your website apart from that of your competitors. Remember, the look and feel of your website should stand out from other websites. It should be something that people will remember.
Your dentist website design should be an expression of what you do as a dental professional. Years of hard work have gone into studying, training, and building your practice into what it is today. You and the work you do, though it may be in the same arena as your competitors, is uniquely your own. Shouldn’t your dentist website design reflect this? After all, for many people nowadays, the website is their first introduction to a new dentist, and didn’t someone once say, “Always make a good impression?”
