Guide to Dental Website Design

Did you know that 94% of users will leave a website if it has poor design? Not only do low-quality websites increase user bounce rates, but they also reduce the perception of credibility. As a dental practice, trust is vital to success.

If you’re thinking of building a dental website for yourself, it’s imperative that you create a solid design that entices users to explore your content. Easier said than done, right? Not after you read this guide from The Dental SEO Experts.

Keep reading to learn how to design a dental website.

Benefits of Having a Dental Website

Before we get into our guide on the best web design practices, let’s first explore what makes having a dental website worthwhile.

Increase Exposure

Having a website opens your dental clinic up to more potential customers through digital marketing options. For example, once you’ve created a website, you can implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing tactics, which help your site appear highly on search results. It also means you can connect your website to essential marketing services like Google My Business, allowing nearby customers to find your practice on Google Maps.

Improve Patient Experience

A dental website is an excellent way to improve patient experience by acting as a central information hub for your practice. Instead of having to phone your practice to gain information on your services or service updates, patients can simply go to your website, creating a more convenient process.

Digitize Services

Having a dental website affords you the opportunity to digitize your dental services and further improve the customer experience while streaming business operations. For example, a dental website can have appointment scheduling options available for patients to easily book appointments in just a few clicks. This makes the patient experience hassle-free and frees up your staff to work on other tasks.

What Makes Good UI/UX?

First things first: what is UI/UX? User Interface (UI) comprises the elements seen on screen that allow users to navigate and interact with your website, such as buttons. User Experience (UX) is, as the name suggests, the overall experience a user has while using your website. UI/UX are closely intertwined and often confused.

So, what makes for good UI/UX? Generally speaking, the fewer on-screen elements, the better. A clean UI makes the UX smooth, efficient, and unconfusing. However, there are many instances in which a minimal UI is not possible. In these cases, you should carefully consider the placement of your UI elements, keeping things in sidebars, making use of accordions, and dropdown menus.

What Design Elements Should Your Website Design Include?

Your website should have a clear navigation bar at the top of the page. Though mobile-style dropdowns may look pleasing, they force users into additional clicks to get to their desired page. This might not sound like an inconvenience, but failing to show clear navigation right off the bat is likely to cause confusion.

Speaking of mobile styling, designing your website with mobile users in mind is vital in 2023, as almost 60% of site visitors come from mobile devices. One way to do this is to implement the use of modular design, boxing content into “cards” that can be organized side-by-side or stacked.

Atomic Design Principles

When designing dental websites, or any website for that matter, following the atomic design principles is an excellent way to create an effective design of the modular components, making later changes easier. Atomic design is broken down into five elements, which designers build upon as they go, starting with atoms.

Atoms

Atoms comprise the basic building blocks of a website, such as inputs, buttons, and labels. These are elements that cannot be broken down any further without losing their functionality. For example, once you take a link or dynamic code away from a button, it ceases to serve its purpose, meaning it no longer functions as a button.

Molecules

Molecules are simple UI groups and elements made up of atoms. For example, combining a label, button, and input box creates a search bar – this is a molecule. See how the atomic model is shaping up yet? Just like interface molecules, chemical molecules are made up of atoms – the foundation of everything.

Organisms

Organisms are a step up from molecules. They are groups of atoms and molecules comprising complex UI elements. For example, you might take your search bar molecule and combine it with a slideshow of images creating a group of molecules to make a header. This is known as an organism.

Templates

Templates are page-level elements that organize organisms, molecules, and atoms into a layout and determine the page's structure. For example, we would put the header at the top of the page, which could be followed by an organism containing text, buttons, and images explaining the website’s services.

Pages

Up until now, the atomic design has mostly been based mostly around outlining UI elements. When you get to the page level, you can begin populating your design with real content that you may wish to use later. For example, the images you added earlier in the header should now be updated to reflect your final design.

Dental Website Design From The Dental SEO Experts

At The Dental SEO Experts, we understand that you might not have time to design a website while running your practice. That’s why we’d like to offer our services to you. Schedule a free consultation with us today to see how we can help your practice with our high-quality dental website and design services.