The usability of dental web sites can be one of the most complex yet most important aspects of a successful dental web page design. You can offer the best dental services in the world at no cost, but if online visitors can't get your site to work well enough to find what they need, it isn't going to help. Even someone brand new to your site needs to be able to find everything quickly and easily so they don't have to jump through hoops to find the information they need.
Speed
If a dental web page design takes too much time to load, online visitors will click the back button to look for other dental web sites that load faster. For those with dial-up and slow connections, this can cause their browser/computer to crash. Patients who experience this will likely stay away from your site completely.
While the placement of code in the site can improve its load time, the contents included in your online practice will also have an impact on the required load time. Large flash files, detailed images, and audio all increase the time needed for a computer to load your site. This doesn't mean you can't have any of these components, you just need to use them wisely.
Navigation
Dental web sites, particularly those with large amounts of content, need to have easy to use navigation. Buttons in an uncommon place may look nice in your design, but consider the fact that this will cause visitors to have to search for what they need. Being too large or too close together may also cause issues for those attempting to navigate your dental web page design. Finally, consider the color of the buttons or text. It should fit in with the color scheme, but stand out enough so that visitors can find and read them easily. You can wander away from tradition, but keep these things in mind as you work with your designer.
Clarity And Brevity
Online visitors rarely read. Most of them skim over the content, reading the first line and then picking up tidbits that standout from there. Many stop reading before they reach the end of the content. If you have an important link you want visitors to find, try to keep it above the fold or mid-point of the page. You will also find that making the link stand out using color and font will help significantly as well.
The location of content on your page influences the success of dental web sites. After several studies that focused on tracking the eye movement of site visitors, experts found that a majority of clients notice the upper left-hand quadrant most often. The farther away from that point, the less noticeable items became.
Usability is as much about dental web page design as it is about user behavior. Only when dental web sites find the ideal balance between comfortable usability and the need to stand out from competitors will a website become truly successful.