Many animal hospitals struggle with whether to invest in a custom veterinary website or to purchase a less expensive template website. In this article, we’re going to equip you with a few basic and powerful ideas to guide your decision making process, and point you to a conclusion that will probably surprise you!
For starters, we believe the question should actually be: Which website build will be more effective at converting website visits into actual hospital patients. After all, the best thing your veterinary website can do for your animal hospital is to be an absolute conversion machine so that the business itself actually grows.
There are real factors that determine your website’s chance of getting a visitor to take action. The website must be easy to use, offer a great experience, and offer obvious (and numerous) paths of action. But that alone isn’t sufficient. To truly motivate someone, you need to get them to trust you.
So how can your website effectively build trust? Well for starters, people only trust what they understand. Your website needs to tell your unique and genuine story in an interactive and compelling way. This means that the simplest cookie cutter templates are going to have a really hard time encouraging action, as it just won’t feel like you.
Besides having a website that feels like it comes to life and tells your story, there are two other ways to build trust. The first is social proof – your website should make real testimonials a central and frequent experience of any visitor on your site. And the second is the overall quality of design and professionalism on the website – we’ll unconsciously associate the quality of the website with the quality of your hospital.
Here’s the surprising part: We’re not actually advocating a full custom website build. You see, there are underlying principles of good design that stay the same even when their execution changes. It’s kind of like seeing a beautiful city skyline. The buildings are all different, but they all share a few basic principles of good architecture.
So here’s the rub: A cookie cutter template is unlikely to be best. But that doesn’t mean a custom build will be better. Instead, what matters is that principles of good design are followed and that your hospital’s story really shines through when somebody is on your site. The most important thing is to find a company that understand the principles of good design and is enthusiastic about tailoring the website to your unique story. Because after all, what matters is how effective your website is.
Leave A Comment