Your Website: Not Just a Pretty Face

Your website provides essential information for your customers and prospective customers: who you are, what you do, what you have to offer, where to find you, how to contact you. These things are essential. But your website can do more than that.

There may be a lot of jobs around the office that your website can do for you.

Here's a physical therapy site that Lee Ann Larkan and I have recently redone. The new site, below, looks better and fresher than the old one, above, and the content is better for search. (You're looking at the Services page.)

In addition to these good things, Lee Ann also took the opportunity to add the client's basic forms as PDF files. Now, the client's office doesn't have to print and mail these forms -- patients can get the forms whenever they like. It's a savings of time, paper, ink, and postage. The patients have more control, too, so it's a win-win solution.

Another example is Clevertech's site for a dermatologist: there's an interactive form that allows patients to upload their information securely. Again, a savings of resources for the office, including staff time.

These two examples are similar: they're new variants on the old form on the clipboard that medical offices used for years. Your needs may be different. Requesting a quote, making a payment, applying for a job, buying an item, subscribing to a service, checking on a package, scheduling an appointment -- all of these are tasks your customers can do at your website. There may be more. Talk to your web developer about common processes in your shop or office, and you may be surprised by how many can be incorporated into your website.

Adding these special functionalities to your website is often more environmentally responsible, as well as providing an extra measure of convenience for your customers -- and the savings in staff time can make this kind of site development pay for itself quickly.