Health Care Web Site Development

Globe and Stethoscope: Medicine and the Internet

You may be wondering how a site like this is created.

Health care web site development is not as difficult as it might seem. You really don't need to know any complicated computer code. All you need is a passion for the subject matter and the motivation to put it into writing.

More specifically, the first thing you need to do is to choose a concept or theme that you are passionate about. There are lots of areas in health care these days that are begging to be explored in a "web-book" such as this. You also need to know the audience to which you wish to impart your knowledge or opinions - usually you would have to choose either healthcare professionals or patients, unless you can think of a good topic that would appeal to both groups. This site, for example was written mostly with the medical professional in mind, although there may be some patients who would be interested in knowing what the ideals are that medical professionals strive for.

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Many physicians are are using websites to draw local patients into their practices. They are finding that websites are useful ways of communicating with patients, developing practice surveys to evaluate patient satisfaction, providing information about how their offices work, listing helpful medical links where patients can get good information. Our office website at Virginia Beach Premier Medical is an example. Having no computer programming knowledge, I personally designed, authored and developed this site myself using tools from Solo Build It.

After you have decided on your concept and your audience, you then need to organize your thoughts or topics into an outline or a tier so to speak. with the main categories on top and several subtopics under each main heading. Then each evening that you wish to devote to your website, choose one of those main topics and write three or four paragraphs about it in your favorite word processor program on your computer. If you are giving medical facts or information, make sure you provide references or links to references for each page that you write. Don't try to write more than one page a night.

After you have written a page on each of the main topics, then you can begin writing a page about each of the subtopics in the same manner. Keep a list of your references to use for a "Resources" page.

Now the question is "How do you make the pages you have created in your word processor into web pages?" You need a web hosting or web development program for this. I picked a very inexpensive one called "Solo Build It" (which actually was created by a physician named Ken Evoy), that turned out to be very easy to use as well. Again, you don't need to know computer code except for very rudimentary codes that are very easy to learn.

When you begin to enter your text into the web development program, you will be asked to find a specific keyword for each page that you enter so that the search engines like Google can find your pages. The web hosting program that I used had all the tools that I needed to do this.

If you keep writing good content that people are interested in reading or learning, you will soon have 30 or more pages which would constitute a website with some significant depth. The web hosting program can then show you how to promote your site so that more people find out about it. Your traffic then begins to grow and then to "snowball" as one person tells another what they read on your site. It's kind of exciting to watch this occur as time goes on.

In addition to drawing patients into your practice, you can even make income directly from your site if you get enough traffic by placing a few ads here and there. This is easy to do using the tools from your web-hosting company.

If you develop your website even further into perhaps 60-70 pages or more, you could potentially use it to create a manuscript to send to a publisher; or you could use portions of your site to create your own "e-book" that people could download to their computers from your site for printing out and reading. Incidentally, everything that you write on your site is automatically copyrighted.

In order to make your site stand out as reliable and creditable, you may wish to apply for verification by the Health on the Net Code which requires that your site follow certain rules to verify credentialing and authenticity. You can then display their icon on your site.

I found that writing content for this site was actually very enjoyable. It has allowed me the ability to essentially write a "book" without worrying about whether it would ever be accepted by a publisher, but yet it has the potential to reach a number of people that hopefully will benefit from it.

For transparency, I am now an affiliate of "Solo Build It", which means that I do make a commission on sales that originate from this site, so I have to consider myself biased to some extent. Nevertheless, even without that, I feel certain I would refer anyone who is interested in health care web site development to this particular resource since I know it worked well for me.

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