Does this sound like your hospital website content publishing process?
ALL of your hospital website content needs to be fed through one person who has to actually build the pages using an HTML editor which is a slow, time-consuming process and puts a finite cap on the amount of information that can be shared through your hospital website on a regular basis. The process of supporting and publishing information on your hospital website is simply too cumbersome and needs to be improved. Managing and communicating with your website doesn’t have to be so complicated.
Rebuild Your Hospital Website using WordPress
WordPress is an Open Source Content Management System. This means that your site will be supported by a developer community that is rapidly approaching an active level of over a million dedicated developers worldwide. A new properly designed website will be able to grow and evolve with the web much more efficiently and cost effectively than your current site.
Ok, support great. What else can WordPress do?
In addition to on-going site development, security and support using WordPress, a whole new level of community engagement potential is possible. A FirstTracks WordPress website will allow your hospital to have a completely integrated site blog, events calendar, website search tool, and highly superior search engine optimization tools that will make creating, linking and sharing your hospital information as easy as writing an MS Word document. Supporting and adding content to your website should be easy and fun, i.e. something you want to do. A FirstTracks WordPress site will make that a reality and allow hospital personnel to spend more time writing and engaging with your community and less time fiddling with code and HTML files. Here are FirstTracks top 5 reasons a Platform shift to WordPress is the right move for your hospital:
1. Usability improvement through better data organization
Typically most hospital websites are very linear. There is very little dynamic content relationships being created on your site. Everything is separated and organized into their own separate containers and they don’t talk to each other or relate contextually in any way. With a WordPress website, we are able to create smart data relationships between key information touch points at your hospital like Events, Doctors, Services, Your Blog and Resources.
For example: If I am looking at your medical services and I want to know what doctors you have on staff who supply that service, I have to go to the medical staff section and then click on that service type again. Using some simple database relationships within WordPress, we can easily create a template for your medical services and medical staff, allowing you to AUTOMATICALLY display the medical staff on the medical service pages they serve and vice versa. This would be accomplished by simply connecting their service categories together and designing the template system to display that relationship. This makes the site more useful to your users.
2. Completely integrated internal website search tool
Either your hospital website has a search that doesn’t quite work right or doesn’t have one at all. This can’t be helpful or reassuring to your users when they are searching on your site for something specific they need. Converting to a FirstTracks WordPress site will automatically make ALL of your website content searchable using the built-in search tool functions of WordPress. It will make the search process for your users much more seamless and provide reliable and up-to-date results because it will be running directly off the databases that support all your content.
3. Easy to use for non-technical users
Most of the hospital websites we’re involved with are managed by one person and all content needs to be published through one resource who needs to know some pretty technical software. A FirstTracks WordPress site will change that forever. WordPress allows your hospital to give authorized staff members the ability to contribute updates whenever needed. This can include a review and approval process. Simply clicking a single “publish” button places the information on your website. That’s how a FirstTracks WordPress website works.
You have the ability to have multiple users of varying access levels publish content which will make it easier for more people to be involved in supporting the site. You control who has access. More participants means more current information and better community support and connection. WordPress is BY FAR the easiest website CMS platform to learn and almost impossible to break. I have trained clients of all skill levels on the software and am continually amazed at how user-friendly the controls are. Users just get it.
4. Easy online registration & payment
The WordPress platform allows you to have online forms that not only enable you to collect and direct questions from the website to the proper departments, but also to save those requests and export that information for future communication via other mediums such as direct mail or email marketing campaigns? Using WordPress combined with a fantastic plugin called Gravity Forms, you can easily create as many contact forms as you like and the plugin has the ability to save and export all form submissions from the back-end of your website. This can even be used for online payment and registration for events using a PayPal account AND also directly integrates with MailChimp (broadcast email program). This is a major game changer for any hospital because it allows you to be pro-active about using the interactions happening on your site every day to help support and grow other marketing communication channels.
5. Community connection and social media integration
A FirstTracks WordPress site would allow your hospital to become a much more active and vibrant source of health information for the community you serve, simply because you will be able to empower your visitors to comment, share and link your content all over the web.
There is no getting around it, Social Media is here to stay. The average person spends roughly 20 minutes on Facebook EVERY DAY. People are Tweeting and YouTube is the second biggest search engine network on the planet. If your site isn’t set up to take advantage of these spaces properly, your online visibility will continue to shrink over time. You need to be able to connect your information to your content networks quickly and easily so people can engage with it in the places they frequent. It’s all about the user and how they want to receive and engage with your information.
A FirstTracks WordPress site can make this process easy for you, but more importantly easy for your site visitors. Adding single click share tools to ALL of your WordPress content is simple. You can even set-up auto content feeds from your site that will do things like auto Tweet new content and share a note with your Facebook wall feed for your business page. All you have to do is focus on creating the new information for the website and WordPress takes care of the rest.
Excited? Want to know more about how WordPress can help your hospital website?
Good. If you have made it this far you are definitely someone we need to talk to. Lets get a conversation started and discuss how we can help you take complete control of all of your online marketing and communication channels today. Give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our Website Development Request Form and we will be in touch shortly to discuss your hospital website development project.
