Health Sites on the Web: 10 Keys to Success
Designing a health web site isn't a hit or miss affair. Certain elements of site design and content consistently appear in successful health sites. The difference between a popular health site and a failed one often depends on how the web site owner interprets and implements the following ten success strategies.

See What's Out There
Before designing and launching a health web site, it's instructive to see how much competition you have. The good news? Not much when compared with other industries. Although there are thousands of medical centers, services, and wellness stores, they have been slow to take advantage of the Internet. While big name companies have extensive and well-established sites online, there is plenty of room for smaller health sites to carve out their own niche.

What Are the Big Guns Doing Right?
While few health businesses can hope to compete with the major pharmaceutical company sites and information sites such as the Mayo Clinic website, studying the major players provides clues to their success, and sometimes mistakes to avoid. A successful health site has closely examined other health sites, with an eye to design, content, and services. Build upon strategies that already work.
Reliable Content
Reliable, well-written content is the background of many types of web sites, but especially so for medical sites. A number of studies have reported that the majority of health site content is either flawed, self-contradictory, or just plain wrong. The Journal of American Medical Association reported in 2001 that up to 53 percent of health sites contradict their own content, raising the question of site accuracy and reliability.

While this is a serious challenge for health sites, the situation also offers opportunities. With so much erroneous information online, the health site that offers accurate information written by subject experts is clearly at an advantage. Accurate information builds trust between any website and its visitors. For a health site, such trust is essential.

Simplify the Medic-Speak
While medical site content must be written by experts in the field, it does not follow that content should sound like it. The average web visitor will not come to the site with an extensive medical knowledge, and their medical vocabulary is usually limited. You cannot, for instance, use the term enuresis and assume readers will know it is the medical term for bed-wetting.

Medical terminology should not be overused on a health site. When specific medical terms are necessary, they should always be clearly defined and explained. Too much medic-speak, and visitors become confused and seek information elsewhere. Here lies one of the challenges to any successful health site. Sites often must explain complex medical condition clearly and simply, without overusing the medical terms that describe those conditions.

Up-to-the-Minute Updates
To keep content as accurate and timely as possible, a successful health site has to update and review content on an ongoing basis. Any new development in the site's subject areas should be reported as soon as possible. The site may wish to have a news section, where updated information and breaking medical stories are featured.

Showcasing updates to site content builds trust between the site visitor and the health site. Regular updates also give site visitors motivation to revisit the site to discover new developments.

Accessible Information
Health sites need to be accessible to people using different screen resolutions or Internet browsers. Some site visitors may have vision problems, or have disabilities that make computer use difficult. Resolution and browser problems are problems best solved by the web site designer. Large, clear fonts can make sites more accessible to the visually impaired.

Information should be kept as short as possible without sacrificing accuracy. Some people have difficulty scrolling down long websites; it is often better to divide a long page into multiple pages that don't require scrolling, and to provide easy-to-follow links to the next section of the article (for an excellent demonstration of how to do this, examine how the Mayo Clinic divides up its articles on diseases and physical conditions).

Privacy Policies
Any web site that gathers private information has to have both a clearly written privacy policy and a method of securely storing such information. Private information gathered by a medical or health site is especially sensitive, and a successful health site takes every precaution to ensure that client information is kept safe, and deleted when no longer needed.

The web site's privacy policy needs to be clearly spelled out, so the client is assured that the site will not use his or her information for any purposes other than the ones specified. As concerns about identity theft grow, a well-written privacy policy and secure data storage are becoming essential for the successful health site.

Easy-to-Use Services
If a heath site offers services, whether in the form of online appointment bookings, prescription renewals, or an online health store, services must be streamlined and easy to use. Any difficulties clients have accessing services need to be addressed immediately. Internet users aren't very forgiving about difficulties when trying to access services; one problem, and users go elsewhere.

Security is also a concern when providing these types of services. Users must be assured that their private information is not at-risk, and all transactional data should be sent using secure socket layer (SSL) technology.

Limited Graphics
Graphics certainly have their place on a successful health site, but only when used sparingly. Too many graphics increase a web page's load time. If a page takes longer than fifteen seconds to load, it's taking too long. Fifteen seconds may not seem long, but for a user waiting for a page to load, it seems like an eternity.

While graphics should be limited, they can be very helpful to a health site. Some concepts that are difficult to describe in writing can be portrayed easily as an image. Multimedia can also be used to show concepts that words alone cannot convey.

Style and Content
While accurate content is important to a health site, site design has an immediate impact on site visitors. A study at Stanford University discovered that 46.1 percent of site visitors decide if a site has credible information based on the site's layout, color scheme, and font choices. A health site that matches a visually appealing design with accurate content is well on its way to being successful. buydomains