Gadgets for Your Dental Website

Call Tracking

If you are serious about measuring the impact of your website, you should consider having a unique phone number posted on the site. We strongly encourage that for all our clients. The cost is minimal, and it provides valuable feedback. Most clients choose to have this be a toll-free number, but local numbers can be arranged.

These calls will be routed to your main office number so that patients will have the call answered instantly and normally. But then you will be able to log in to a call reporting page where you will be able to see who has called that special number and will even be able to listen to a recording of the call. You will also be able to identify any missed calls because of the line being busy or not answered, so that you can recapture any potential leads.

If you have us install this feature, we will also monitor the phone calls, and it will help us tweak the effectiveness of your website. If the phone calls are recorded, that provides us with the best information. We have even helped coach offices with telephone answering skills.

Make an Appointment Page

We recommend the use of a "make an appointment page" for the convenience of visitors to your website. Often people are surfing the net at odd hours and your office isn't open. Some of them would prefer to leave their contact information with you and have you take the responsibility of calling them rather than their trying to remember to call you. This can represent 10 to 20 percent of your website referrals.

At Infinity Dental Web, we include a "make an appointment page" standard in all our website packages. We like to make the link to this page highly visible on every web page. We recommend against links in floating boxes and pop-up windows that many visitors find annoying. We recommend in favor of making this page a clear request for them to "make an appointment." Merely having a "contact us" form is too vague. Be direct about what you want them to do, and many of them will indeed respond.

Walk-On Spokesperson

One feature used by some websites is the "walk-on spokesperson." When you land on the home page, a video is activated. You see a person walk onto the screen in front of you and deliver a message. This person can be a professional model or even the dentist.

While this looks classy, we don't believe it adds to conversions, and can have the effect of chasing people off the site. We had an example on the website of Dr. Wes Urich, a Minneapolis area dentist, but the walk-on spokesperson has since been taken off.

Elaborate Flash Effects

The use of moving images does enhance most websites, though there are a couple of important things to be said about the use of flash on websites. The first is that we are now discouraging the use of flash programming for our clients and encouraging javascript for moving images. Flash continues to have some stability problems, and it doesn't work on iPads and iPhones.

When it comes to the use of flash or other moving images, we can go as high-end as you want. We have designers who can produce very sophisticated designs, creating dazzling three-dimensional effects or other impressive displays. These elaborate flash effects are labor-intensive, so they are costly, and we recommend that you think it through carefully before spending money on these effects. We closely monitor conversion rates for our clients, and find that sites that are relatively plain often perform just as well as sites that are fancy. Sometimes, going overboard seems to make visitors feel that they are being over-sold, and they become distrustful. But if the image of your practice is one of high-end glitz, you may want to consider putting money into these elaborate effects.

If this is what you want, let us know and we will include that in your estimate.