A website is a reflection or extension of your physical business – it represents you, your team, and your mission. You want your website to give your potential patients the same feelings and emotions that they would have walking into your office. Potential patients want to see who you are and what your office looks like before they book an appointment. Your brand, your philosophy, and your dental style need to be conveyed in the first few seconds a vistor spends on your site. Your web development team can take care of branding and getting your philosophy across, but there is actually something we need from you to make it come full circle: Real photographs.
I’ve done my own research with friends, family, and neighbors and asked what they feel is important when looking for dentists online. What keeps them scrolling on the page? What makes them click? The number-one responsie is seeing real photographs somewhere on the homepage. Whether they are photos of the dentist or the office, web visitors want to see an image that relates to the business, instead of only stock photography. Not to say stock photography is bad; sometimes it is necessary, but the more personal your marketing is, the better able potential patients will be to connect with you, even before meeting you.
There are many opportunities within your website to place an image:
- Homepage Banner – Almost everything in web design is getting larger by the minute, especially the images at the top of the page (usually right below the logo). This is a perfect spot to display pictures of your office or team. Take a look at one of our doctor’s website. He sent me a photo of his groovy office and the whole website was able to be designed around the color scheme and style of his office (place a photo of hussong’s site). This gave visitors a good idea of what they will be walking into when they visit him for the first time.
- About Us Page – This is the second most visited page of a dental website. We place you and your staff’s biographies here along with an image of them. Your potential patient would like to see who they will be talking with before their first visit.
- Smile Gallery – This is where we display before/after photos of your work. If you can get visitors to stay on your website long enough – this is an important page to have. Besides just seeing who you are and what your office looks like – people certainly want to see examples of your successful treatments! Just make sure your patient gives you their consent before sending the photos to us. Here is an example of one of our smile galleries:
Every site is unique and will have plenty of space to accommodate personal pictures. I encourage you to either take some photos of the office and your staff yourself better yet, hire a local photographer to help you showcase your photos professionally.